Public Participation in Railroad Relocation

Abstract

This paper describes the remarkably successful, award‐winning citizen participation strategies employed by the professional staff of the Lafayette Railroad Relocation Project, in Lafayette, Indiana. It shows that continuous application of a variety of communication methods during the several corridor selection and engineering phases of the project helped to determine the optimal acceptable design, and have secured for it the necessary local public input and political support to obtain local and Federal funding through the completion stage of the engineering work in 1984. The participatory techniques employed are both numerous and simple enough to be adapted to a variety of major engineering projects, where both public and political support are vital factors for success.