I don't understand how you feel so comfortable handwaving the idea of "fixing" the fact that broad chunks of the American population are radically less able to turn up for a couple hours to participate in public comment sessions. There's any number of underlying causes, ranging from having to work multiple jobs or bad hours to having families to take care of or lack of reliable transportation.

In many cases public comment doesn’t require showing up, it requires filling out an online form.

To the extent that it does require showing up, we should do things like hold multiple sessions at different times of day.

But none of those issues is what the OP is talking about.

“public comment process, which sharply biased towards negative comments structurally”

He’s saying public comments are inherently biased towards no even given equal opportunity to participate.

I think that's the same reason why online reviews tend to skew negative: people that are against something or that have had a negative experience are more likely to speak out. That doesn't make their voice less important. But you should always compared this against the size of the population. If a restaurant gets 5 1 star reviews it could be a very bad restaurant. But if it turns out that those five reviews are all by the same person and that 1000's of people visited the place and none made a positive review then that gives a completely different perspective.

The stats in TFA are such that it makes you wonder what the total numbers are, for that there are different methods (for instance, surveys).

You don't even have to think hard about why turnout skews "no". You can see immediately why your neighbor might show up to comment against a new apartment building on their block. But what neighbor of yours has even considered showing up to comment in favor of one? Most of your neighbors are probably just fine with development, but almost none of them are nerds about it, which is what it takes to show up to support a commercial developer.

To me that seems like a mistake of whoever organizes these things.

A few years ago they were planning a massive overhaul of a roundabout nearby. Half the neighborhood showed up (weekday, after work), pretty much all of my neighbors were there. Some out of interest to see what was going to happen, others for input. I made the case that I thought that the sight-lines for bicycles were terrible with the way they had planned the new roundabout, traffic would be going faster than before (which was the goal of the change) so it really would relieve congestion but it would make it much less safe to cross the road there. There were two options, one would have been very costly (a bike tunnel under the road, also not without problems of its own), the other was more practical and required a change in the angle of the bike path and a change in the design of the center of the roundabout. They listened, took notes, redrew the whole thing, had a second round of feedback and that too was incorporated as much as possible within the budget. Then they went ahead and implemented the change. Everybody reasonably happy. Note that this was not even a municipal thing, technically that roundabout is just outside of the municipality but they had this hearing anyway (and on the other side of the road, so everybody going there had to cross it which really helped my argument, they had all just experienced how hard it is to see if there was a car coming).

This kind of process can work. They could have done it online as well (and during COVID that is how such meetings were held here). I'm sure this is not typical and that there are many examples of where objections were overruled by this was one case where I felt I was both heard and that something was done with the feedback. Nobody said 'no' to anything, not the locals, nor the province who govern that stretch of road.

Now, if you planned on putting a datacenter in between the village and the highway I'm not so sure that would get the same kind of constructive feedback. Because there wouldn't be any plus for the locals that they could perceive so likely they would be categorically against it. But that position would be fairly broadly shared unless some jobs would be created.

No, it can't work. Elections are decided on turnout. We schedule elections on specific days, with great ceremony, in part so we can maximize turnout. Public comment processes are the opposite. They structurally select for people with high-amplitude opinions, and for what should at this point be obvious reasons the high-amplitude opinions about development are almost uniformly negative. It's the exact same phenomenon that keeps guns deregulated in the United States: most people support regulation, but the people who don't really don't and turn out disproportionately.

If you set up a process that selects for people who can show up at random times on random days and that samples exclusively from people who pay unusual amounts of attention to policy and have high-amplitude opinions, you are going to get disproportionately older, wealthier, whiter, owner-class participants who are sharply skewed towards opposition.

You don't have to take my word for this; you can look this up in the literature, too. But I was just at a large public meeting about a rezoning we're doing; turnout around 150 people, and I was one of the youngest in the room.

That sounds depressing, for want of a better word.

It's depressing that we widely deploy these antidemocratic processes! But it's not depressing that turnout math works the way the rest of math works.

If we can switch to 'work from home' for a large fraction of the population at the drop of a hat I think with all of these technically savvy people there should be a way to improve on this. If that's not true then what is all this tech good for anyway?

Some of the people that don't participate are people who aren't even aware of the benefit that will be available to them. Should I speak up at every meeting in favor of a high rise apartment building because I might move into it? Anywhere in the country? I'm not sure I can do that. Public meetings might preclude non-residents, which privileges the status quo very directly.

Should I speak on behalf of my young kids and say they might like to live there in twenty years?