seems to cast doubts on the process itself. Planning and development of a freeway system must be at metropolitan scale, and the metropolitan system must be accepted as an integral element of a statewide highway network. A rapid transit line and even major arterial route development are facilities of regional importance and must be planned and developed at that scale. Yet their impact, both desirable and undesirable, is felt at a very local scale. While residents of a neighborhood or even a larger community may strongly favor a freeway system, they object to its location in their own neighborhood or community, and even rail rapid transit proposals share this same problem. Differences between local and regional goals can hardly be unexpected, but the highway program brought them into sharp focus. The highway program also gave those with ecology concerns, often at all costs, an opportunity to focus their efforts. The only answer seemed to be to bring the citizens more directly into the planning process.
The Congress first recognized the need to give citizens the opportunity to comment on proposed highway projects in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, but for diametrically the opposite reason for what is now fundamental to project acceptance. At that time citizens and travel-oriented businesses in small towns feared the loss of business if the Interstate System, with its required control of access and widely spaced interchanges, were to bypass their communities. Responding to these groups, the 1956 Act, under section 116, declared that as a matter of policy:
Any State highway department which submits plans for a Federal-aid highway project involving the bypassing of, or going through, any city, town, or village, either incorporated or unincorporated, shall certify to the Com- missioner of Public Roads that it has had public hearings, or has afforded the opportunity for such hearings, and has considered the economic effects of such a location. Provided, that if such hearings have been held, a copy of the transcript of said hearings shall be submitted to the Commissioner of Public Roads, together with the certification.
From this start grew the public hearing process, with all its inadequacies, dissatisfactions and problems. As it developed, it may have caused more problems than it solved, and it is still a troubled area. Early, most highway departments looked on the public hearing as an unfortunate added step in project approval and went into the hearing intent on defending their decisions against criticism. Later, as the requirements were extended ultimately to cover nearly all Federal-aid projects, States increasingly attempted to make the hearing a constructive step, often in difficult cases employing consultants to develop various alternatives for consideration at the hearing, although only recently recognizing that one alternative should be to do nothing. The assumption that a project was to be built and that citizen suggestions might help decide which alternative was most suitable met with little favor among groups which wanted only one thing—to be left alone. Criticism developed over the tendency to make only engineering and economic analyses (after all, the law only required consideration of economic effects) and ignored social and environmental factors. As time went on, the requirement for two public hearings, a location hearing and a design hearing, was introduced, and in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, the Congress, responding to mounting dissatisfaction with the highway program in many urban areas, amended the language of the 1956 Act by striking out the words “economic effects of such a location” and substituting the words “economic and social effects of such a location, its impact on the environment, and its consistency with the goals and objectives of such urban planning as has been promulgated by the community.” This change clearly brought the hearing process directly into the planning area, where previously it had been regarded generally as an engineering function. It imposed a further load on the “3C” process, but it moved the process to closer liaison with engineering.
This change still did not suffice as a means of reconciling divergent views as to the highway program, and in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1970, the Congress further required that the certification by the State regarding the public hearing must be accompanied by a report of the consideration given to the economic, social, and environmental effects of any of the alternatives that were brought up at the hearing. It must be assumed that representations had been made to the Congress that the States paid insufficient attention to suggestions made at the hearings.
During the consideration of this amendment, the Committee on Public Works explored with the Federal Highway Administration the desirability of requiring a third public hearing, preceding the location and design hearing probably to be called the planning hearing, at which more basic questions would be discussed and hopefully an agreement reached that a highway improvement in the particular corridor or area indeed was necessary. Concern over what such a hearing process would involve led to the counter suggestion that FHWA would devise a strategy by which there could be meaningful input by citizens into the planning process. To this the Committee agreed and the requirement for the third hearing was not pursued.
Thereupon it became incumbent on FHWA to develop guidelines to bring this about. Examination of hearing transcripts and of other means some States had used to reach agreement with local groups and communities showed many examples (ranging from modification of Interstate project design to not having a village street), of changes stemming from the hearing process. Conferences, organized by the Highway Research Board and other agencies, reviewed examples of effective citizen participation and of the problems of achieving it. Primarily, it had to be concluded, citizen participation was most effective when it was handled on a person-to-person basis, a highly subjective approach. The problem FHWA faced was trying to institutionalize such a subjective procedure.
The result was that the first step involved little more than advising the State that the citizens must be brought into the planning process, and gave them examples of some successful devices to do that.
This first step was followed by a more formal requirement in 1973 responding to section 136 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1970 under which each State was called upon to develop an “Action Plan” to ensure that proposed highway projects are based upon a balancing of the adverse economic, social, and environmental effects and the cost of eliminating or
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