Transportation Agencies

Published in

The Neighborland Handbook

6 min readApr 12, 2019

Over the past several years, we’ve partnered with over fifty transportation agencies at all levels of government on a variety of project types including: investments in multi-modal infrastructure and the public realm, district and neighborhood plans, community development initiatives, and long range master plans. We help our partners develop engagement strategies and implement community-centered processes. Most importantly, we have helped our partners achieve their goals — 100% of plans we have supported have been approved, and collectively these agencies have made over $1b in transportation investments in their communities.

We have designed and built a variety of engagement tools for transportation planners on our platform including: collecting insights, facilitating dialogue, mapping insights, surveying, prioritizing and making tradeoffs, sharing resources, and scenario planning. We have also built software that integrates seamlessly with existing workflows and tools, helps synthesize and visualize data, and creates insightful reports. Our new Citywide solution enables transportation agencies to administer multiple projects across their jurisdiction (region, county, city, district) on one common platform.

We have worked closely with city, county, regional, state, and federal agencies on the development of these tools. We would like to thank the Southern California Association of Governments, Atlanta Regional Commission, New Orleans Regional Transit Authority, City and County of San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency, County of Miami Dade Transportation and Public Works, and MetroPlan Orlando for their strategic partnership.

Capabilities

Easily publish and manage project websites. No web design or development skills are necessary. The site is hosted on a cloud-based, SEO-optimized platform.
Quickly publish text, images, video, documents, and events to project pages.
Collect, curate, and publish stakeholder feedback (ideas, votes, comments) on maps and scenario renderings.
Upload stakeholder feedback from workshops and events in public space.
Provide a simple, easy-to-use discussion forum for residents.
Moderate stakeholder engagement with project administration tools.
Publish single- and multiple-choice surveys, and collect stakeholder input.
Map resident ideas, insights, and solutions to specific locations and categorize by topic.
Notify residents on project milestones with automated email notifications.
Visually theme pages with each project’s visual identity.
Collect insights with SMS, voice phone calls, and/or Twitter.
Analyze project and participant data (including optional demographic data) with a real-time project dashboard, Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics integrations, and an automated sentiment analysis tool.
Provide government and enterprise level security and reliability (99.99%+ uptime).
Provide consumer grade site performance (2 second or less page load times).
Enable residents to easily share feedback on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google).
Meet ADA and W3C requirements.
Support the current versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge.
Engage with residents in any language supported by Google Translate.
Access project data via our JSON API.
Collect donations via Stripe.

Success stories

Southern California Association of Governments

We are helping the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) craft and execute an engagement strategy that will help participants play a meaningful and constructive role in the creation of the 2020 Regional Transportation Plan and Sustainable Communities Strategy (RTP/SCS). We are helping SCAG explore a range of land use and transportation strategies with the public through intercept surveys in public space, workshop activities, and online.

MetroPlan Orlando

MetroPlan Orlando is leading the Corrine Drive Complete Streets Study in coordination with Orange County, the City of Orlando, and the City of Winter Park. The planning team used our Scenario Planning and Sentiment Analysis tools to collect insights from thousands of residents on six possible street designs, along with several safety improvements in the plan area.

City and County of San Francisco Planning Department

Neighborland has provided the engagement platform for several of San Francisco Planning’s projects, including the public realm plans for the East Cut, Central Waterfront and Dogpatch, Market Street, and Lower Haight neighborhoods. Transportation agency partners include Transbay Joint Powers Authority, Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Bay Area Rapid Transit, SFMTA, Caltrans, Caltrain, and the State of California DOT.

The South Downtown Design and Activation Plan provides a framework for designing, implementing and managing the public realm in the emergent neighborhood surrounding the Transbay Terminal and East Cut neighborhood.

The Central Waterfront and Dogpatch Public Realm Plan coordinates complete streets and open space projects led by a variety of public agencies including SFMTA, Caltrans, and Caltrain.

The Market Street Prototyping Festival engaged over 250,000 residents in an unprecedented program to design a more vibrant and connected public space.

Atlanta Regional Commission, City of Atlanta Department of City Planning

The 67 acre Turner Field site is one of the largest project sites in any metropolitan area in the U.S. and presents a rare opportunity to dramatically reshape Downtown Atlanta. To ensure that residents from the surrounding neighborhoods played a meaningful role in creating a broad-based, inclusive, and representative vision for the site, the City of Atlanta Department of Planning and Community Development and Atlanta Regional Commission led one of the most innovative, community-centered planning processes in the City’s history. Over 4,000 residents participated on the project by sharing their ideas, priorities, and comments at public meetings and on the Neighborland platform.

New Orleans Regional Transit Authority, RIDE Nola

In 2011, NORTA allocated $90m raised in a municipal bond to finance the Rampart St. Claude Streetcar project. Construction began in 2015, and 22 months later, on October 3rd, 2016, the North Rampart / St. Claude streetcar began servicing the residents of Marigny, Tremé, and St. Roch. This project exemplifies how a passionate group of city leaders, transportation advocates, and residents can collaborate to make something seemingly impossible happen in their community.

Wayne State University

Wayne State University’s Office of Economic Development led this placemaking initiative to engage students, faculty, staff, and the community in Midtown, Detroit in the physical design of the campus. Using lighter, cheaper, quicker tactics, the initiative tested community-generated ideas on the campus and several successful pilot projects have been implemented by the university.

Miami-Dade County Department of Transportation and Public Works

City Innovate Foundation partnered with Miami-Dade County Department of Transportation and Public Works (MDT) and a number of private sector technology companies (Microsoft, Cubic, Lyft, Zipcar, Siemens, Neighborland) to write a policy playbook that will help Miami-Dade build a multi-modal transit network. We helped MDT craft a user research strategy as part of their effort to “ground-truth” their product assumptions. Our open and transparent discussion forum enabled Miami residents to discuss the future of the county’s transportation system.

City of San Jose Planning, Greenbelt Alliance, Street Plans

Greenbelt Alliance worked with the Street Plans Collaborative to design, plan, and implement tactical urbanism interventions as part of the West San Carlos Street and South Bascom Avenue urban village plans. Hundreds of residents participated in opportunity identification and prioritization via Neighborland.

Public Square

Led by Greenbelt Alliance, Public Square was an innovative civic engagement program that gave the people of Mountain View a new way to actively shape the future of their community. Greenbelt Alliance’s program model focused on engaging residents in an open and transparent dialogue, both in public space and online. The program connected over 1500 neighbors and community leaders with the City of Mountain View. Their insights helped inform the city’s strategic plans, including the El Camino Real Precise Plan and the North Santa Clara County Bike Vision Plan, both of which will enhance the quality of life for residents for years to come.

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Making it happen

We believe technology can help make transportation planning better for everyone involved, including urban planners, developers, and residents. It should be easy for residents to understand and provide feedback on projects that will affect their lives. It should be easy for project managers to publish their plans for public review, and communicate construction updates. And it should be easy for planners to collect and analyze public feedback, and help their elected officials make better decisions.

That’s why we’re here. We want to help you create places that reflect what is truly important to the communities where you serve.