How Your Voice Can Help Shape Transit

You take the survey. You share your opinion at a community event. But what happens to your feedback afterward?

In this episode of That Transit Show, host Monica Spain welcomes Community Engagement Manager Chelsea Ongaro to discuss how Community Transit uses public input to plan transit projects and services.

Using Swift Gold Line as an example, Chelsea explains how feedback can influence decisions about bus stop locations, road designs, and other project details. You'll also hear why some proposed Swift Gold Line designs include bus lanes in the middle of the road, why early feedback is important, and what's next for transit in Snohomish County.

Plus, learn about future opportunities to share your thoughts, including the proposed consolidation of Everett Transit and Community Transit.

Whether you ride the bus every day or just want to know what's planned for your community, this conversation explains why your input matters and how to get involved.

Learn more about Swift Gold Line: https://ctgo.org/swiftgold

Explore That Transit Show: https://ctgo.org/thattransitshow

Creators and Guests

MS

Host

Monica Spain

HY

Producer

Henry Yarsinske, Jr.

Producer

Laurel McJannet

Digital Content Strategist at Community Transit

What is That Transit Show?

That Transit Show is produced by Community Transit in Everett, WA. It highlights the people, services, and stories behind public transportation in Snohomish County, Washington.

- Hey, everyone. Welcome to "That Transit Show." I'm Monica Spain. Have you ever gotten a postcard from Community Transit or maybe filled out a survey asking about some of our service and wondered where does that input go, where does my feedback go? Well, today on the show, we're talking with community engagement manager, Chelsea Ongaro, and she's going to tell us all about where your feedback goes. Welcome aboard. Chelsea Ongaro, welcome to "That Transit Show."

- Thanks. I'm excited to be here today.

- Well, I'm excited to have you because I've worked with you for several years, and our work is really adjacent. We're both in communications. But what I do is more like general communications to the public. What you do goes deeper. At least that's the way I see it. So I guess I'll learn more about it from you today. It's called engagement. So we're not talking about, like, wedding rings, we're not talking about planning for a wedding, not that kind of engagement. And we have this opportunity now for people to participate. If you're watching this now, we're just entering an engagement period for the Swift Gold Line. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that, and then we'll go more into, kind of, the tactics and other things that you do in engagement.

- Yeah, sure, of course. So, you interviewed Morgan last year about the Swift Gold Line to learn more about that, but it's one of our Swift projects. So people might be familiar with Swift Blue or Green or Orange, which opened in 2024.

- [Monica] These are our bus rapid transit lines, our most popular service actually.

- Yeah, so buses that come where you don't need to check a schedule. They have stations with more amenities than what you might find at a regular bus stop. And the Swift Gold Line will run from Everett through downtown Marysville and up to Smokey Point Transit Center in Arlington. So it's our first Swift line that's in North Snohomish County. We're also trying something a little bit different with Swift Gold Line.

- [Monica] Okay.

- Our other Swift lines operate in the curbside lane. So just like other buses, they stop on the side of the road and load people in. We're looking at doing center running transit-only lanes for Swift Gold Line, which is a method that some bus rapid transit around the world uses for bus rapid transit projects, where there are dedicated lanes in the center of the roadway where the buses operate. So, you don't get caught in traffic, cars don't get caught behind buses. They can have more reliable schedules because they're not as prone to traffic impacting them. So, it really helps get people moving, and they kind of create more of like a placemaking in the community. Like, they're much more visible to people because they're in the center of the roadway.

- Okay. And it's easy to access, isn't it?

- Yeah, absolutely. So, that's a question we get a lot actually. They're like, "Are people just running across the road?"

- Yeah. How does that work? Because you're used to just being on the sidewalk and catching your bus, yeah.

- Yeah. So usually, the stations are built at intersections, or we put a crosswalk in to accommodate that. And it's in the center, so the crosswalk kind of goes through the station. So they actually are great for people that might not even be using the station if you might have disability or accessibility needs and you can't make it all the way across the road or even kind of wait at that pedestrian refuge island.

- [Monica] I see.

- But, you know, you cross half of the road to get to the station. So, it improves safety in a lot of ways, because you're not having to cross traffic going in both ways to get to the other side, because, you know, you might be traveling one way where you get on the bus on your side of the street, but on the way back, you have to cross the full street to get there. So, in this case, you would just cross half of the street each time to get to the station in the center.

- Okay. So, we're in this engagement period. I think it's technically phase three. Is this the third time we're going out to the public and asking for their input, their comments on the Swift Gold Line on the design? Tell us about what we're asking people this time.

- Absolutely. Yes, so often for larger projects like this, we'll do, kind of, multiple phases of engagement where we're presenting information to people. And, you know, we don't have all the information at the beginning. When we did phase one of the project, it was really focused on where the route might go. Like, through Marysville, there were multiple options, like which roads the bus was going to operate on. Last year, when we did phase two, that was more focused on the proposed station location. So we had, like, intersections where we were proposing the stations were going to go. This time, we have what we call lines on maps. So we're in preliminary design, which is 10% design. We can talk a little bit more about what that means.

- Yeah, 10%. Okay.

- But we now have multiple things that show what the project really could look like, so check it out, www.ctgo.org/swiftgold. But you can see roll plots, which are very technical drawings, but they're kind of a bird's-eye view of what the project could look like. So it shows the lanes that cars would operate in, where the sidewalk would be, where the center running transit-only lanes would be, where the stations are, and how that might impact the surrounding properties. So, at the station locations, the road needs to get a little wider to accommodate those stations. So that means that sidewalks have to get a little closer to businesses in some cases. It narrows again when you're not at a station location, but it does kind of show those property impacts. And we're actually talking directly with property owners about that this time around. So we've reached out to property owners that might have potential impacts to talk to them about what the project is and how it might be impacted and to understand what their needs are and if we might want to adjust the design to accommodate what their needs are, what the public might share.

- So what we're really talking about here is working with the community to understand the impacts of what we're trying to build and to try to get some input into that. Of course, there's things that we can't control, because when you're building a project, you know, you're dealing with the way the road is built and those kinds of things and what exists around it. But when you're talking about telling people, "Okay, we want you to look at these lines on a map, roll plots," like, if I haven't looked at one of these before, what am I looking at? What am I looking for? How can I provide my input?

- Yeah, we actually have something that accompanies those roll plots that are a little less technical that help people envision what it might look like. We call them visualizations. So, it literally is like a picture of the roadway, either from the street view or from overhead. So you can actually see a station there at an intersection and see how people might interact with it in cars. And we have animations that show cars driving by. So that's a really good accompaniment to that and can help people picture what they're seeing on this roll plot. For reviewing the roll plot, we really want people to look at them, specifically for the property owners, you know, do they have trucks that come in, and that turn will be tight for them, or that driveway is really important to them? Or do they have access from an alley in the back? Like, trying to understand things like that. And, you know, the community, we are experts in transit, but the community are experts on where they live and how they use the community. And it's also their transit service. So it can be helpful to hear things like "It's really important to have an ADA parking space in front of this business," or "Maybe we can't put it there, but we can put it around the corner for the business." Like, things like that can be really helpful, so it helps us identify those mitigations. And like you said, there are some things that we can't control or that are technical constraints for how the project works. For example, the Swift Gold Line has a really good one at State Avenue & 88th in Marysville. We know that that's a huge intersection where lots of people travel and make connections with transit, but we're not proposing a station there because there's not enough room. There's a railroad on one side and a cemetery on the other side, and we can't make the road lighter at that location. So, you know, some people commented and said, "I really want a station here," and we just can't provide that. But that kind of comment does help us, because we can think about other alternatives besides building a station, like maybe the Swift line can stop at a regular bus stop there, or maybe we improve frequency or move local bus around to help connections easier in that area.

- So how are you going to be getting this information from people? People have probably heard public comment period, you know, "Go here to comment, provide your input." These are things that we say all the time here at Community Transit. So how do people really, like, not just for Swift Gold Line, but for any public comment period or any time that we're going out and saying, "Tell us what you think about this proposed project." How do we get to them, and how do they engage with us?

- Yeah, that's a great question, Monica. And there are so many ways that you can do it. One of the things about community engagement is that you can always do more, and you can always try new things, which is exciting. And it kind of depends on how much time you have, how many resources you have, and who you're trying to reach. We use a lot of different tactics. So Swift Gold Line is one where we kind of pull out all the stops to reach everybody. But we often think of things in, kind of, buckets. So we will create an online open house. They mentioned earlier. That's where the survey lives, that's where all the information lives on the project, and we'll drive people to that to fill out surveys. But we also know-

- So that's a website.

- It's a website.

- It's not actually an open house, but it's an online open house where people can go look at all the information, see some of these lines on a map, things like that. And I guess you can tell me more about what's there as you go on here.

- Yeah, the reason we call it an online open house is we try to lay it out as if a person is experiencing an open house. So if you've ever been to an in-person public open house that's like at a library or something like that where there's boards and staff and you kind of go around station to station, an online open house is designed like that. It's supposed to replicate the experience of going through that. But we know that not everyone has time to come into an in-person open house at a time that we set and ask people to come. So it tries to replicate that in an online space, and it creates a lot of flexibility for how we drive people to it too. And we also know that some people don't have access to the internet or aren't able to review all that information online. So we use all kinds of other tactics to try to reach them. So we use a lot of digital tactics to reach the general public, people that might want more flexibility. And we also send things like emails to people that have signed up for our email lists. We use digital advertising on, you know, Facebook and Google and YouTube to drive people to that online open house. But to reach those more vulnerable populations that might not have access to the internet or might not have heard about the project, we will use a variety of other tactics. So, a really important one for us are partnerships with community-based organizations. This is something that we started doing a couple years ago, and it has really helped us a lot. Last year for Swift Gold Line, we worked with the Arlington Food Bank as well as a few other groups. But I know you interviewed Arlington Food Bank.

- We did, and I was just about to say, like, can you give me some examples of some of these, we call them CBOs. CBO stands for-

- Community-based organization.

- [Monica] Thank you. Okay. Yeah.

- Yeah, the Arlington Food Bank was a great partner for us. We worked with four CBOs during that engagement period, and 38% of the surveys that we received were from those partnerships. And what we did specifically with Arlington Food Bank, they will post things on their social media and through their email distribution list, because they're like a trusted partner in the community. So people might not follow us, but they follow the Arlington Food Bank. And, you know, they have, people that visit food banks are often people with lower incomes or fit into more of those vulnerable populations.

- [Monica] And they're in that community.

- Yeah.

- Like you said. These are the people who are going to be potentially using the service.

- Absolutely. And they know how to reach them. The Arlington Food Bank also has this great thing where they put together backpacks for kids that fit into, kind of, those lower income groups. And we put flyers in those backpacks, for example. So it was something they were already doing, and we were just able to, like, tap into that. And then, I think the most effective tactic we used with them was, we did multiple events where we went to both their mobile food banks and the food bank at the site. And we just had a table and, like, clipboards, and we talked to people about the project and had them fill out surveys while they were waiting to pick up their food. So, it was just a place to meet people where they were at, and we got to talk to them about the project. And in a lot of ways, they're the people that will use this. They live in the Arlington community, they will use Swift Gold Line, and a lot of them were so grateful for the opportunity to provide input and help shape what the project might look like.

- Did people tell you things also besides just filling out surveys? Like, when you go to these places, or we host an event at a library or somewhere else, are people also telling you things that they're not writing down? And if that happens, how do you capture that?

- Yeah, that happens a lot. And also, people will tell us things that aren't related to the thing that we're asking about all the time, and that's partially why we do it, you know. People want to talk about accessibility needs that they have, and we make sure to pass that information along to groups at Community Transit that work on that kind of thing. But yes, we know that surveys are not something that's accessible to everyone. You know, they take 10 to 15 minutes to complete. Sometimes they're highly technical, and sometimes people just want to have a conversation with you.

- [Monica] Yeah.

- And we're happy to do that even if they do fill out a survey in any way. And that also happens. We'll do things like go to farmers markets or other festivals, and the main point there is to talk to people. If they're interested in the project, we'll try to get them to take the survey either then or at home, but those conversations are really valuable. Like, I don't want to discount, you know, the quantitative surveys are great, and that's how we get a lot of the input, but those conversations can have just as much helpful information. So, we will bring little sheets where we take notes on what people tell us. Sometimes, when we talk to someone, if they don't want to fill out the whole survey, we'll say like, "Will you fill out a comment card or something like that just so we have it recorded," and it's in their words. But, you know, if they don't want to write it down, we just kind of paraphrase what they said. And a lot of times, you know, the comments fall into similar categories, but sometimes people will provide little gems that you didn't think about. Or sometimes people will be ambassadors in their community. They'll be like, "Oh, I didn't know about this. This is great. I'm going to tell all my neighbors."

- Can you think of anything that you've heard, I know you've heard so much, but is there anything that you heard that really made you think differently about a project or something that you thought, "I've got to bring this back to our planning group because we hadn't heard this"? I don't know. Maybe there's nothing there or maybe there are a million things there.

- Yeah, there are definitely a lot of things there. Something big that I've heard when we did a accessibility workshop for the Smokey Point Transit Center, we talked a lot about, like, different ways that are accessible for different people that might have different disabilities. And you know those, like, textured dots that are on the ground that help people with low vision or people that are blind access transit? Those are, like, that's what the purpose of those is, but for people who-

- [Monica] Are they, wait, are they called a tactile boarding strip?

- Yeah, that is one, tactile boarding strip is one type of that. You also may have noticed it like-

- [Monica] Sometimes they're yellow.

- Sometimes they're yellow.

- Yeah.

- They're often more subtle and, like, different types of that as well. Like, last night, I took light rail down to the Paramount in Seattle, and you can follow, like, lines on the ground that are textured to help you, like, go up the stairs and get to the tactile boarding curving. So it's not just those dots, there's, like, all kinds of things. But I had someone who was using a walker share with me how difficult those bumps get to navigate with a walker.

- [Monica] Interesting.

- And it's, you know, it's hard to balance what different people need, but it was really helpful for the team to hear that, because there might be a different way that you can design the tactile boarding strips so that it's easier for a walker to roll over them, for example.

- You've talked about a lot of the ways that you reach people. Why is it important to get this kind of feedback from people for different projects?

- Yeah, so we talked about how people are experts on their community and we are not. I mean, many of the people that work here use transit or live in the community, but, you know, if a project is happening on your street, like, you're an expert on your street.

- [Monica] Yeah.

- And you might not be. And it also is important to ask those who are the ones who use it and pay for it. You know, our service is paid for with sales tax at fares. So the people that use it are the ones who own it really. So, we want to make sure we design something that works for them. Because if it doesn't work, why are we designing it?

- [Monica] Yeah.

- And, you know, it's important to balance, it can be hard to balance, like, individual comments, because obviously, we can't accommodate every request that someone makes.

- [Monica] Yeah.

- But it really can help us to consider different ways that we might try something, or at least to know, okay, it is a problem for people with walkers to roll over tactile boarding strips. We can't eliminate the tactile boarding strips, but maybe we can change how they work. So it creates that opportunity to, like, think about different ways to do the project. I think that it also is really important to reach the people who actually use it, because, you know, as I said earlier, the vulnerable populations don't always have the time to do that. They have a lot of things to do, as do most people. So we try to offer different incentives to help bring people in and kind of compensate them for their time. And we can't always do that directly, but we always use a sweepstakes, for example, when we do a survey. So, if you complete the survey, you can, at the end, fill out some information. You get put into a drawing for a sweepstakes. And for a lot of people, that's a big incentive to take a survey.

- What are we talking? What are the goods?

- Typically, we do $200 gift cards. It depends on how big the project is, but this is like a Visa gift card that you can sign up to fill out. You have to be 18 years or older in order to get it. But as long as you fill out the survey and fill out the information at the end, you're eligible for that sweepstakes.

- So that's something newer that we've been doing.

- Yeah, that's actually something that I borrowed from our research and analytics division. So, they do more scientific surveys where they're curating a sample of people to collect information from engagement. We're making it available for anyone to provide their input, so it doesn't fit into that, like, scientific survey. But they use incentives as well, and they said it's really successful for them, so we thought we might as well try that.

- Yeah.

- And it has been really successful for us.

- [Monica] Oh, interesting. So you've gotten more people to-

- Yes, for sure.

- Oh.

- In phase two for Swift Gold Line, we had 550 people fill out the survey, which is significantly more. And it's hard because it's not always... There's a big difference between something that's the whole county and something that's only a few cities in a county.

- Sure.

- And a lot of times, we're asking for input on something more conceptual, which can be really hard. It's hard when we're like, "Hey, we want to talk to you about our 50-year plan for what transit could look like." And that's just really hard for people to imagine.

- Yeah.

- But it also-

- Or they think like, "Maybe that's not going to even impact me. Why would I bother thinking about this?" Or "I don't have time to think about that right now."

- Yeah, but it is really important, because the feedback that we get on the long range plan shapes all of the work that we do across the whole agency. And the later you get in a project, the harder it is to make changes to incorporate input. We talked earlier about 10% designs. They're in preliminary design, and that is, when you look at the lines on the map, that's not to say this is exactly where everything is going to go, and we know, like, this is it. That's kind of, like, we've looked into conceptually where things are, we're going to do more studying here from the community, we'll make some adjustments. And then you move through other design milestones later, 30, 60, 90, final. Those, to the general public, 30% design looks done.

- Oh! Okay. It doesn't sound very done.

- [Chelsea] It doesn't sound very done.

- But what you're saying is the decisions are made, right, that are going to kind of set the path for how the project is built.

- Exactly. Like, big decisions about where a station is going to go and, like, what route the things are going to travel on, like, that, at 30% design, that kind of thing is set. When you get into 90% design, you're talking about, like, "We're going to use this type of concrete instead of this type of concrete," which is not exactly, like, you wouldn't see that, like, it's not something the general public would-

- Comment on.

- Comment on.

- [Monica] Yeah.

- And when we were talking about the long range plan, that's way before these design percentages. That's years and years before. And when you were doing something more conceptual, we get fewer comments on that, because people are just not seeing how it impacts them directly. But we will use a lot of these tactics that we've learned are successful the next time we update our long range plan to help us reach more people and, like, explain why it's so important to give that input early on.

- Okay, so 10% doesn't sound like you're very far down the path, but that's really, is this really one of the last opportunities for people to weigh in on a project when-

- Yeah. So, on Swift Gold Line specifically, we're doing this engagement period now on preliminary design. Next year, we'll come back. The technical team will have looked at all of the comments. They'll have done a little bit more technical analysis, and they'll say, "All right, this is where the route will run, this is where the stations will be, and this is how it will operate." Like, it's going to operate in the center running transit-only lanes or in the curbside. And that's called the draft locally preferred alternative, which is a very technical term. People will be able to comment on that draft, so saying, "We heard you, this is what we're proposing." And then after that, it will go to our board to make a decision to approve that locally preferred alternative, and then we'll kind of continue forward in design. So, that's not to say that you can't ever provide comments. You can provide comments in lots of ways that are not specific to our engagement periods too, you know. You can call customer care, you can talk to someone at the ride store. People do that every day about Swift Gold Line sometimes, but about all of our service.

- [Monica] Yes.

- But the big milestones where we're, like, really trying to get input from people will become less and less frequent as the project moves closer to being launched.

- Yeah. So Chelsea, you've talked about a lot of projects just now, and I'm wondering if you can tell us, kind of, what's next, and also what's next for your program? How do you want to evolve engagement so that even more people can get involved?

- Yeah, I'm going to take that second part of the question first. So when I started at Community Transit, I was the only person doing community engagement, and now I have a team of three total people, including myself. So we've grown a lot.

- Yeah, maybe people have met Sam and Christina at some of these events, yeah.

- Yeah, we're often not at events. We also often work with consultants that help add to our team, because it's a big lift during these periods where we're out at lots of events and we want to try to reach as many people as possible. So, growing the team was a big part of growing the program. You know, as I said earlier, the more resources you have, the more you can do. So we could do more partnerships with community-based organizations. So we would love to work with more organizations across the county. We would like to build those relationships not just for how they can help us, but like how we can help them. We want to know those things too. And I think there's a lot of other... We'd like to try to do more of this multi-phased engagement like we're doing for Swift Gold Line where it's more iterative. So we hear from the community, we make some changes, and then we go back. So that's a big change that we've made since I started here, is trying to be more iterative about what we're presenting. So it's not just, "Here's the final product. Let us know if you have any thoughts." Just getting that feedback earlier. In terms of what's coming up in the near future, so on November 4th and November 5th, the Everett City Council and the Community Transit Board will vote on whether Everett is annexed into the Community Transit service area. If that's approved, we have a big body of work for us coming up next year while we plan what an integrated network could look like to incorporate Everett into our service area.

- Well, Chelsea, you have a lot to look forward to. It's going to be a busy rest of the year and going into next year, so I wish you a lot of luck with that. And thank you for being on "That Transit Show."

- Thanks so much. I had a great time today.