ABSTRACT
The Transportation Equity Act for the 21 st Century mandates that Metropolitan Planning Organizations coordinate plans, programs and projects within a region. Such coordination is required to be able to receive federal transportation funds for transportation improvement programs. A transportation improvement program is a three-year program of transportation projects that must be created (or updated as the case may be) every two years. The Puget Sound Regional Council prepares the regional transportation improvement program for a fourcounty area in the central Puget Sound region. In this study we interviewed staff members of the Puget Sound Regional Council to discuss the challenges and opportunities for GIS use as pertains to the regional transportation improvement program. Early on in this study it became readily apparent that there is very limited use of GIS for decision support, i.e. relative to the proposed technology reported by the authors in a previous study related to this topic. Thus, this study became a social-behavioral search about why there has been so little use of geographic information technology when the task is so inherently geographic in character, and GIS technology is readily available. It is not that we suggest that technology should be used, but rather a curiosity of the constraints and/or lack of use. In this chapter we therefore make use of social-behavioral science methodology (outlined in Chapter 4) to explore the character of group decision making, while using Enhanced Adaptive Structuration Theory 2 as the framework. As such, we perform a proposition analysis, as a step beyond construct analysis, as presented in Chapter 5. A construct analysis, based on constructs from Enhanced Adpative Structuration Theory 2 (presented in Chapter 2), followed by a proposition analysis based on premises, is what we call “case analysis”. In a case analysis we are in search of explanations about information use and the relationship to decision groups. A construct analysis helps us answer questions about “what”, whereas a proposition analysis helps us answer questions about “why”. As a report on this case analysis, we
perform a construct analysis of the 1999 regional transportation improvement program process. We report on the f indings from proposition analysis that takes advantage of the results of a construct analysis. We provide a discussion and interpretation of those findings. A conclusion provides a broader context for what we found.
