Engaging communities for the Highway System Plan

By James Detke

The highway system connects communities and provides access to jobs, schools, services, and the state’s natural wonders. It is important to plan for the future of this system and determine what types of investments are needed to assure that people driving cars, riding in vanpools and buses, transporting goods, walking, bicycling, and rolling can reach their destinations.

Our new 2024 Highway System Plan (HSP) replaces the 2007 version and is a roadmap for preserving, maintaining, improving, and operating state highways for all people using all types of transportation. The plan recommends program funding for preservation, maintenance, and the capacity and operational improvement of the highway system over the next 20 years. The draft Highway System Plan will be open for public comment beginning Nov. 1.

This blog post is the first of five that will highlight the plan’s key findings and the process behind its creation. In the following posts, you will learn about the planning process behind the HSP, how we addressed greenhouse gas emissions, different investment scenarios, and the reasoning behind our funding recommendation to the Washington State Legislature.

The Trent Avenue Bridge is one key piece of the highway system that connects
communities on either side of the Spokane River.

How have we been engaging the community?

Community engagement has been an ongoing process while creating the HSP and we have been engaging communities across our state to learn their priorities and how they use the highway system. Not only is it a legal requirement to engage the public, but it allows us to understand the public’s perspectives and create a plan that meets the changing needs of as many residents as possible.

From the initial planning phases of the HSP update, the project team prioritized public input. Over the course of the plan development, residents contributed feedback through a survey, an online opinion poll, virtual public meetings, scenario workshops, in-person outreach, policy board briefings, and an online open house. While no investment recommendation will satisfy everyone, this robust community engagement process helped the Highway System Plan find a non-partisan funding recommendation.

We designed our outreach to include people who are traditionally unable to participate due to age, disability, income or national origin, which helps to give us a complete picture of highway funding priorities in our state.

A representative state survey asked participants to prioritize a hypothetical annual budget of $3 billion across highway-related budget categories. In conjunction with the survey, we interviewed Advisory Committee members about their funding priorities. The HSP Advisory Committee is comprised of local agencies, advocacy groups representing business and environmental interests, Municipal Planning Organizations, Regional Transportation Planning Organizations, and tribal governments. Together, this feedback allowed us to develop a variety of scenarios that fit the priorities of our residents.

We brought these scenarios to community members who attended our meetings and workshops. Through the virtual public meetings, we introduced attendees to the project and encouraged them to take the online opinion poll. During the scenario workshops, we explored different conceptual funding scenarios and gathered feedback to refine the scenarios down to three funding options.

The HSP team found that some groups were underrepresented in that outreach. To assure that our community engagement incorporated the views of everyone who uses our highway system, we interviewed people with low income, people of color, those with limited English proficiency, and adults aged 18-34. The interviews focused on understanding how people’s day-to-day lives intersect with roads and transportation.

Takeaways from engagement

Some major takeaways from our community engagement include:

• Across all regions and demographic groups, there is strong support for preservation and maintenance funding.
• Our residents prefer strategies that increase safety and efficiency for the existing system, while still funding some highway expansion. These strategies include environmental retrofits and improvements to safety, public transportation, active transportation, and transportation operations.
• There is a need to address equity by increasing travel choices, improving access to affordable housing, and creating economic opportunities from highway investments for overburdened and vulnerable communities.
• Residents believe it is important to address climate change and resilience.
• Freight is critical to our transportation system.

The draft Highway System Plan releases Nov. 1

The draft Highway System Plan will be open for public comment beginning Nov. 1. Once updated, the HSP website will have information about the HSP, the draft plan for your review, and an online open house. There will also be a link to join the virtual public meeting from 2 to 3 p.m. on Nov. 30 where you can learn more and provide direct feedback on the plan. The public comment period is available through 5 p.m. Monday, Dec. 18. We look forward to hearing from you - your feedback helps us make recommendations that best serve the diverse communities affected by transportation decisions.

Join us next week for our blog post about how we used financially constrained planning for the Highway System Plan.