Improving Residential Parking with Interactive Document Review

When a UK local authority proposed expanding its Residential Parking Permit Scheme, it needed to balance efficient digital consultation with opportunities for residents to provide detailed, location-specific feedback. While GoVocal served as the primary survey platform, Konveio complemented the consultation by allowing residents to review the full policy document and comment directly on the sections that mattered most to them.

The result was a more informed consultation process that combined structured survey responses with contextual, document-based feedback, helping the highways team refine the final scheme before implementation.

Problem

Wokingham Borough Council was proposing changes to its Residential Parking Permit Scheme in response to increasing parking pressures around town centres, where commuters and shoppers were occupying residential streets. The consultation included:  Expanding permit parking into additional residential streets, introducing visitor parking permits and updating permit policies affecting residents and businesses.

Because the proposed changes directly affected where people could park outside their homes, the Council wanted to gather meaningful feedback from the residents and businesses most impacted.

Approximately 1,500 residents and local businesses received consultation letters containing QR codes directing them to the online engagement platform.

While the Council primarily relied on a survey to gather structured responses, they also wanted residents to review the complete 20-page policy document and comment on specific proposals. Without Konveio, the Council would not have posted the draft PDF for public comment, since residents would have needed to reference page numbers or paragraphs in separate emails, making detailed feedback difficult to provide and manage.

Solution

Rather than simply downloading a PDF, residents could review the resident parking permit policy consultation document online, leave comments directly beside relevant text, provide location-specific observations and discuss policy details beyond the structured survey questions.

To encourage participation, the project team added guiding prompts throughout the document, including questions such as:

• Do you agree with these principles?
• Should motorcycles require parking permits?

These prompts helped residents understand where feedback would be most useful while still allowing them to comment anywhere within the document.

Because comments were attached to precise sections of the proposal, staff could immediately understand the context without interpreting lengthy emails or trying to determine which paragraph a resident was referencing.

Impact

The consultation received:

• 520 survey responses
• 52 substantive public comments submitted directly within the Konveio document

Although fewer participants commented within the document than completed the survey, the Council found the comments to be significantly more detailed and useful resulting in a more informed community feedback process. 

Residents frequently highlighted issues affecting their individual streets, including requests for additional parking restrictions and comments about specific locations that would not have been captured through survey questions alone.

Instead of receiving emails referring to “paragraph five” or attaching separate documents with annotations, staff could immediately see:

• exactly which policy section a resident was discussing
• the surrounding context
• all related comments in one place

This streamlined review for the highways team responsible for analysing consultation feedback.  Following the consultation:

• Feedback was reviewed alongside survey results.
• Part of one road was removed from the proposed scheme based on resident feedback.
• A subsequent statutory Traffic Regulation Order (TRO) consultation was completed.
• The updated Residential Parking Permit Scheme was implemented successfully.

Why Konveio

For the Council, Konveio’s greatest value was making lengthy consultation documents genuinely interactive.

Rather than publishing static PDFs, residents could engage directly with proposals, while staff received contextual feedback that was easier to understand and analyse.

The platform also eliminated the need for residents to explain which section of a document they were discussing, creating a smoother experience for both participants and project teams.

As one member of the engagement team explained:

“It’s a really good way of having the document there for people to read and also having that option to comment on it instead of it just being a PDF where people can’t make annotations. It makes it much more straightforward.”