Effective Use of Citizen Advisory Committees for Transit Planning Operations

This synthesis describes the state of the practice for involving advisory committees in transit planning and operations, exploring the experiences from a few agencies in detail. The purpose of this report is to provide practitioners with guidance about how their colleagues across the country are involving advisory committees and ideas for how to structure successful advisory committees. This synthesis is based on the results from survey responses received from transit agencies and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in 46 states and the District of Columbia. More than 80% of respondents indicated that they had involved an advisory committee in the past 3 years. Additionally, two transit agencies and three MPOs were selected for case studies to highlight their successful practices for committees with different structures and authority levels providing input on different kinds of agency and MPO activities.