Digital Storytelling as a Transportation Planning Tool

Abstract

The planning phase determines the success of a transportation project; however, planners’ visions often may not reflect the collective opinion of users, limiting the project’s potential. Traditional public participation methods face operational challenges and resource constraints, which can have a subjective influence on planners’ decisions. Digital storytelling (DST) offers a promising alternative, capable of significantly influencing human behavior. This study investigates DST’s effectiveness in facilitating public opinion and affecting planners’ decisions, aiming to bridge the perspective gap between planners and users. A dedicated Facebook group was created to gather public opinions from Bangladesh on the transportation system. Over 3 months, the group generated over 496 posts in text, image, and video formats, with more than 1,100 comments. With over 360 images from these posts, the images were converted to text using a vision encoder (Vision Transformer)–decoder (Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2) model. Through text mining and topic modeling on the captioned images, post captions, and post comments, topics were extracted. Following an automated process combining artificial intelligence (AI) tools, a documentary was created for the DST video. The documentary was then shown to planners from stakeholder transportation organizations in Bangladesh. Using a two-phase questionnaire survey for the analytic hierarchy process, the study assessed the psychological impact of DST on planners before and after viewing the video. Findings indicated that DST significantly affected planners’ decision making in 60% of cases. The authors propose DST as an effective medium for public engagement in transportation planning, with potential for further exploration using AI.