Public engagement, digital technology and transport: engaging through open, early and experience-centred perspectives at scale

Public transport plays a significant role in people's everyday lives for commuting, business, and leisure purposes. Increasingly, the way the public is able to access information about passenger services has been transformed through digitalisation. Despite these digital transformations there remain very few opportunities for people to become directly involved in shaping the design of public transport at an early stage to reflect their personal preferences and experiences. In this paper, we outline and analyse an innovative digital engagement strategy for new trains on the Tyne and Wear Metro network in North East England. This engagement involved people in the design, specification, and detailed features of a new fleet of trains. This was successful in generating over 33,000 public engagements that, in turn, shaped the design and procurement of the trains prior to construction. We discuss how participatory digital technologies can be used to configure engagement, facilitating critical and constructive commentaries. We describe how centring people's experiences, imagination and curiosity can lead to more meaningful engagement through digitalisation, where the public are not merely the users of transport services but may also be its architects.