NJTPA "CONNECTING COMMUNITIES" PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
STATEWIDE, NJ
McCormick Taylor led a comprehensive public engagement campaign for the NJTPA's "Connecting Communities" initiative, developing multilingual surveys, organizing virtual and in-person events, and collaborating with a diverse Stakeholder Advisory Committee to ensure inclusive participation across northern and central New Jersey.
THE CHALLENGE
The North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA) is the federally authorized Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for 7 million people in the 13-county northern New Jersey region, which has 384 of the state's 564 municipalities. Each year, the NJTPA oversees more than $3 billion in transportation improvement projects. NJTPA was looking for creative, meaningful public engagement to gather feedback to update the region’s Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP), regardless of people’s age, income, race, ethnicity, or ability. The outreach had to gather feedback from across NJTPA subregions: Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Hunterdon, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union and Warren counties, and the cities of Newark and Jersey City.
HOW WE HELPED
McCormick Taylor developed a multifaceted outreach campaign for the NJTPA’s Connecting Communities plan. NJTPA values extensive, inclusive, and meaningful public involvement to ensure that transportation investment decisions reflect regional priorities. There were numerous opportunities for members of the public to get involved. The project team helped NJTPA create a survey about transportation, equity, and opportunity. The survey focused on multiple modes: walking, biking, transit, and driving. While NJTPA is only obligated to translate their long-range transportation plan materials into Spanish, McCormick Taylor encouraged NJTPA to translate the survey into five languages—Spanish, Chinese (simplified), Korean, Portuguese, and Hindi—to reach a wider audience. We distributed multilingual bookmarks to approximately 100 libraries across north and central New Jersey.
The McCormick Taylor team organized three virtual events focused on topics such as bicycle and pedestrian safety, downtown deliveries, and transit. All of the events and survey materials were supported with social media outreach, as well as paid social media ads. A Stakeholder Advisory Committee comprised of representatives from a diverse cross-section of North Jersey non-profits and government agencies provided guidance to the project team regarding effective ways to reach hard-to-reach populations. Partner organizations that wished to help spread the word about the survey and events were able to download a toolkit with prewritten social media messages and graphics to help spread the word. In addition, McCormick Taylor tracked outreach performance metrics throughout the program.
RESULTS
While engagement is still in progress, thousands of people have participated in the online survey, hundreds have participated in the online events, and hundreds more are interacting with the project team at 15 in-person pop-up events. Outreach is scheduled to wrap up before the plan is adopted in September 2025.