Customer story: Transport for London, UK

Opening up public consultation online

Transport for London (TfL) consult on a huge range of topics, from major infrastructure projects to minor adjustments in local transport schedules.

They had a well-established process for consulting with key organisations and wanted a tool that would enable them to open up these consultations to the general public.

Transport for London opted to use Citizen Space

Citizen Space is cloud-based software for managing, publicising and archiving all consultation activity in one place.

TfL decided that Citizen Space was the right tool for their public engagement work for two main reasons:

1. its ability to make consultations more accessible and engaging to the public
2. its ability to improve the internal processes of running and managing consultations

Because Citizen Space is intuitive and simple to use, it's easier for the public to submit responses to consultations. Internally, the system makes all of the standard requirements for creating consultations a simple task.

Since adopting the system, TfL’s administrators have made innovative use of Citizen Spaceʼs ability to embed rich media, adding maps and Google Street View into consultations so that respondents can visualise the area under consultation.

TfL also makes full use of Citizen Space’s scalability. They run consultations that deal with small areas, such as a particular part of one street, and to consult on issues that affect millions of commuters, such as changes to a tube station.

For example, in 2013, TfL used Citizen Space to consult on proposals for London buses to no longer accept cash payments. This resulted in the largest ever response to a TfL consultation, with over 37,000 responses received.