How Much Community Outreach Does the Urban Institute Think Italy and Turkey Do?

The Urban Institute just published a brief about community outreach for public transportation construction projects. The authors are Yonah Freemark, Gabe Samuels, and Christina Plerhoples Stacy; I don’t know the latter two but I know Yonah well and respect him and his expertise and global curiosity. So I honestly don’t understand why the brief concludes that the US’s problem is “inefficient community engagement” and the solution is to do more community engagement early in the process. Worse, the brief for some reason cites Italy and Turkey, via our transit costs reports, as places that do earlier, more effective community engagement, rather than as places with rather top-down decisionmaking and limited citizen voice. It’s sad, because the brief does go over the problems of the American process but can’t bring itself to the right conclusion, namely that community engagement should be curtailed; its only response to the problems of engagement are to suggest earlier engagement rather…