People’s Opinions and Road Policies: Effects of Public Involvement Activities by the Road Council in Japan

Abstract

The Road Council is the adviser to the Japanese Ministry of Construction (MOC) on matters of road policy at the national level. To be more responsive to society’s needs, the council implemented public involvement (PI) activities to solicit people’s opinions about the New 5-Year Road Improvement and Management Program. The council issued a series of reports that provided information to the people and solicited their opinions before it made its final recommendations to MOC. The focus was on the effects that people’s opinions have on the road policies contained in the reports. The relationship between road policies set by the Road Council and MOC and people’s opinions was analyzed. A document-analysis methodology for extracting key words representing policy measures and identifying policy fields was developed. The study assumed that the number of key words indicates the degree of emphasis in the report. Frequency of opinions for each policy field also was determined. Relationships between the number of key words and the frequency of opinions were analyzed using Kendall’s correlation coefficient. Causal relations within each policy field were analyzed. The results clearly established the influence of people’s opinions on the resulting road policies. The findings also showed two kinds of changes in the documents: ( a) changes initiated by people’s opinions and ( b) changes initiated by the Road Council. So far, PI activities have been applied only at the national planning level. These activities also can be applied to other levels and aspects of planning.

A Novel Framework for Sustainable Traffic Safety Programs Using the Public as Sensors of Hazardous Road Information

“…In the early 1990s, Japan's laws governing urban planning were modified to require more CP in the planning process for local land use and transportation projects [36]. It was mainly implemented for road improvement and management programs at the national level [37,38]. In the United Kingdom, the most visible and memorable moment of CP in transportation planning was associated with major trunk road schemes in the 1990s.…”