Using Focus Groups to Understand Attitudes About Bus-Rapid Transit (BRT) in Southern Oregon

Our Community Planning Workshop team (CPW) recently traveled to Southern Oregon University to facilitate our second of five focus groups as part of our community engagement report for Rogue Valley Transportation District (RVTD), which is seeking to better understand public perceptions of transit enhancements.

Focus groups provide the opportunity to gather information from the public in a somewhat organic fashion; they bring people of varying attitudes and backgrounds together to engage in conversation with each other and facilitators. One of the primary causes of disconnect between planners and the public is created by planners’ tendency to concentrate on the future, which—especially in the case of something more technical and abstract, like transit enhancements—can be alleviated through dialogue.

Focus groups help bridge this gap; we are there to ask for their perceptions and opinions, but have the unique opportunity to inform and answer questions—something more difficult to achieve through surveys and interviews. At each focus group, we used renderings from Pivot Architecture to help illustrate some of the enhancements that may be studied for feasibility in the future and asked about different elements that are often incorporated in bus-rapid transit (BRT) systems.

BRT is seen by many transit districts as the most cost-effective way to move people more efficiently than a traditional bus service, borrowing heavily from light rail systems through designated right-of-way and the use of stations (as opposed to the traditional bus stop). The implementation of BRT, however, has been anything but easy for ambitious transit districts in the US, in-part because there are so few systems throughout the country.

Only a small handful of the people we have spoken to throughout the entire engagement process—which includes focus groups, key person interviews, RVTD rider intercept surveys, business surveys, and a community survey—are familiar with BRT, further illustrating the importance of focus groups. Giving citizens the opportunity to converse, ask questions, and see illustrations is crucial in making the potential changes seem less abstract. This, in turn, makes the public outreach process far more useful and informative for both planners and the public.

Should RVTD decide to move forward in the planning process and pursue BRT or any other enhancements, it will be crucial to use similar engagement strategies to avoid the all-too-common divergence that occurs between planners and the public. Our CPW team will provide RVTD with a number of public engagement recommendations at the completion of this project. Results will be made available in July 2014.

Bjorn Griepenburg is a first year graduate student in Community and Regional Planning from the San Francisco Bay Area. He is interested in the transportation-land use connection and plans to research ways in which cities can better create complete, walkable neighborhoods.