Improving the Design of Civil Infrastructure Messages for the Public

Civil infrastructure serves as the driving force behind the evolution of a safe, sustainable, and efficient environment. However, the way information about civil infrastructure has been communicated to the public has been insufficient. Since every human is intrinsically different, designing, and dispersing information about civil infrastructure that accommodates everyone, while also being direct and concise has been a challenge for policymakers and other federal, state, local, and tribal civil engineering stakeholders. Though there has been a plethora of research conducted on message design and communication in other disciplines, little research has been done in the US that focuses on designing more accessible, actionable civil infrastructure messages. The objective of this research was to investigate how to improve the accessibility of civil infrastructure messages and communication infrastructure to enhance the public's ability to make daily infrastructure decisions. This research study utilized quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze and discuss various ways that civil infrastructure messages can be improved. Results from this study are based on the exploration of three different ways in which civil infrastructure messaging can be improved: policy, transportation/roadway safety, and emergency response. Data sources include eight publicly accessible energy policies from 1978-2022, a publicly available dataset of more than 75 thousand WEAs, and a dataset retrieved from Shealy et al. (2020), which collected data on 300 Virginia drivers in both rural and urban areas. A descriptive policy analysis and Flesch-Kincaid readability test were conducted to historically analyze energy policies and understand their accessibility impacts for research question 1; a brain activation network analysis was conducted and nodal network measures (i.e., network density, degree centrality) were used to investigate the cognitive response Virginia drivers had for various types of non-traditional traffic safety messages for research question 2; and sentiment analysis, emotion detection analysis, as well as a two-phased qualitative coding analysis (i.e., in-vivo coding, focused coding) were conducted to investigate how WEAs can be better designed to increase public attention and engagement for research question 3. The findings from this study demonstrate how emotional content that is present in tweets authored by community members affected by the natural disaster event can be incorporated into the WEA template. The findings from research question 1 identified potential issues with accessibility and energy policy. Also, the findings from this study describe the content included in the parallel documents that federal agencies use to communicate the most important information of a policy. The findings from research question 2 demonstrate that while the various types of non-traditional traffic safety messages produced variances in cognitive response, messages that included negative emotional content or statistics should be further explored on their impact on evoking safer driving behaviors. The findings from research question 3 reported on how emotional content could be incorporated into the template design of WEAs. The implications from this dissertation provide valuable insights for policymakers, civil engineers, transportation engineers, and emergency response stakeholders and the conclusions set the stage for future research to improve the design of more accessible civil infrastructure messages.