Testing collaborative accessibility-based engagement tools : Santiago de Chile case

Abstract

The population of metropolitan areas in developing countries has been rapidly growing and transport externalities -- such as congestion, pollution and traffic fatalities -- have followed, in most cases, the same trend. Latin American metropolitan areas, where generally public transit is still predominant, has important challenges in continuing their economic development without severe increases in transport externalities. At least partly in response, citizens are raising their voices for more reliable and people-oriented solutions. Transportation planning, thus, plays an important role and within transportation planning, increasing public participation in decision-making has emerged as key to providing better transport solutions. As part of a transport planning engagement process, new technologies and new forms of measuring benefits are emerging in practice. Accessibility-based metrics and web-based map visualizations could improve the engagement process with easy-to-read results and analysis, decreasing the complexity of traditional transit project appraisal. CoAXs, short for Collaborative Accessibility-based Stakeholder Engagement System, has been tested in several simulated instances of public participation in the U.S., showing interesting results including potential for co-creation and mutual understanding. This thesis presents an application of CoAXs in a developing country context, specifically in Santiago de Chile. The Santiago experience will attempt to answer questions regarding CoAXs' potential for improving the engagement process and its performance for encouraging higher-scale (metropolitan) conversations, among Decision Makers and Stakeholders. By analyzing the results of the tool application, this research argues that CoAXs use in public settings is capable to promote project impact understanding and project learning among participants, which might improve the engagement process in transportation planning. Additionally, CoAXs Santiago version seems to represent better high scale (metropolitan) project impacts, which provide an initial indication of CoAXs' encouragement for metropolitan level discussions.