Context

In 2021, North Tyneside Council embarked on an ambitious active travel programme to support investment in walking and cycling corridors across the local authority. The programme of work was designed to replace the temporary measures that were put in place during the pandemic.

Given the size of the proposals, each programme of work touched a large number of distinct communities living in different parts of the borough.

Council officers needed to understand the general support for the proposed measures and gather feedback on specific optimisations that could ensure that investments are well spent.

The consultations involved both the wider cycle network across the borough as well as a particularly contested route along the seafront.

Particularly tricky was the programme of work for the proposed sustainable cycling route along an 8km stretch of the North Tyneside promenade and coast. The council needed the ability to respond directly to comments via the platform, manage a large number of correspondences, and generate in-depth, nuanced response reports for engineers and public statements.

What was done

North Tyneside Council officers set up a series of interactive consultations using the PlaceChangers interactive consultation tool.

Council officers used the PlaceChangers proposal map designer to set up the proposals on PlaceChangers. They then turned them into an interactive consultation.

At its core, these consultations included interactive proposal maps that presented respective routes and details on the proposed measures in a context-sensitive way. Proposed measures might range from new crossings, speed calming measures, speed limits, and new shared and segregated cycling provision.

To support the consultation programme, the team at PlaceChangers provided a range of customisations to support the ambitions of the council, including:

• Ability to define colour of routes
• Seeing proposals for specific work programmes for easy discovery by residents
• Mobile-phone optimisations for preview of proposals on mobile phones
• Admins could leave replies to individual comments to clarify
• Respondents could like and respond to other member of the public ideas
• Respondents could easily toggle through design alternatives for a key part of the project
• Automatic topic and sentiment analysis of responses helped to save time
• Detailed cohort analysis provided insights on sentiment for different respondent groups

North Tyneside Council has had substantial success in publicising the consultation via their social media channels, email newsletters, and local news outlets. Given the great interest in those proposals amongst local people, the consultation was widely advertised and even reached national level coverage on the BBC.

Outcomes

For the coastal route proposals, 1,590 residents responded to the consultation and provided more than 10,953 responses across 61 proposals.

Within the first week of consultation, PlaceChangers achieved 100% coverage, meaning that all proposals had received at least three responses.

Respondents could easily locate themselves with geo-location on mobile phones. For the cycle path proposals, they could toggle through the guided tour, walking through the details of measures going from North to South. For the Cullercoats option, the PlaceChangers platform selectively showed details for one of three routing options.

The consultation respondents were largely supportive and complementary to the council's efforts. However, both opponents and proponents of the projects did not hold back in sharing critical feedback on how routes are presently used by cyclists and offering helpful suggestions on how to avoid future conflicts.

Unlike previous consultations, this approach provided the council unprecedented detailed feedback on this complex infrastructure programme. Armed with detailed intervention-level feedback, council engineers had everything they needed to revise the designs and produce a final version of proposals.

At the end of the consultation, the PlaceChanger platform provided a ready-made interactive report that aggregated responses by sentiment and by individual features across 5 major consultation areas. The North Tyneside Council officers could download a detailed export for further analysis of responses.

The use of PlaceChangers also enabled a detailed cohort analysis of responses, for example, to see support across age groups or gender.