Update on Project Activities
Our Team had a productive week where we met with our community partner Dave in San Pedro Valley Park and also met separately as a team to debrief and analyze our existing datasets. On Tuesday February 14th, our team gathered on campus and drove to San Pedro Valley park and met Dave Jaeckel, Ramona Arechiga (San Mateo County Natural Resource Manager) and Courtney Coon (with the Bay Area Puma Project and Felidae Fund). Once there we walked to scope out new locations for the cameras that would be added for San Mateo County’s Wildlife Index Project. We spoke and discussed the techniques for finding an ideal place for the cameras and worked together to install them in several locations. We had hours of conversation with Ramona, Courtney and Dave and debriefed on our conversation on the hour-long car ride way back. Additionally we met on Thursday to further debrief and discuss our field day and find the best way to organize our data for our final deliverable. Our main objective is to format and consolidate the existing data points so that we can best use ArcGIS to represent the information to our client. What We Observed and Learned During our trip to San Pedro Valley Park, we had the opportunity to ask Ramona (the Natural Resource Manager), Courtney and Dave many of our previously unanswered questions. Our notes are detailed below: Puma Facts/Behaviors Pumas (a large focus for local wildlife conservation groups) largely spend their time sleeping during day and hunt for deer and other large mammals at night. Their diets consist 50-80% of deer. Males will separate at 1-2 years old to find their own territory. Males cannot be within 100 square miles of another male or they will kill each other. Land Management Land management is tricky, habitat fragmentation is critical because this means wildlife have less dense habitat. Courtney Coon made the comment, "We don't know what our children in 100 years will want" and commented on the inherent need to make assumptions for future generations in land management decisions. Ramona emphasized finding the highest quality habitat and insulating it, and ultimately recreate it through restoration. Emphasis on eliminating invasive wildlife and plant species. Budget Issues Parks is for greater good, these were formed and protected specifically for human recreation. SM park department is primarily recreation, now trying to improve resource management. Don't have a specific fund for San Mateo Parks. Rather they are funded out of county general fund. Because of this the Parks funding are the first to get cut because parks are not providing essential services (as opposed to health care, food markets, etc.). Operate off of open spaces, survive off of property tax. Excel Data We figured out that much of our collected data is repetitive. We started off with 63000 images and when we filtered out repeat images of the same animal standing in front of the camera (the time stamps are less than ~9 minutes apart). By filtered by the time stamps and through this process we limited our dataset down to 20,000 images. Following this we filtered out images of humans, domestic cats and dogs, and unknown images which eliminated another ⅔ of the photos leaving us with 7200 unique data points for our final deliverable. National Parks vs National Forests Similar to how each park has two different aspects (recreation vs resource management), there are two different federal bodies that govern federally owned lands differently as well. National Parks’ funding and focus is on recreation, but the National Forests’ interests lie in conservation and natural resources. This does not mean it is devoid of human use; timber and mining industries are also affected by National Forests deciding how the land is to be used. San Bruno Mountain San Bruno Mountain was protected from demolition precisely because an engaged community got involved and petition for its protection. However, the butterfly species that used San Bruno Mountain as a habitat provided the political ammunition needed to ensure the lasting preservation of the area and the declaration of the region as a government sanctioned park. Literature Discrepancies According to the data already found by the Puma Project, there are discrepancies between the data in the Critical Linkages Paper and what we are currently observing in the data. This means that in the years that have passed since the data was first collected, the distribution of species may already have changed. It is yet to be determined whether this is positive or negative. Housing Despite the parks not officially being used for human necessities such as housing, the parks actually provide a quiet place for a number of homeless people to sleep. This is hardly a direct reason to keep the parks, but is an interesting service that the parks provide in lieu of what the county fails to offer. Accessibility The park managers are aware of the housing issues in the Bay Area, and are also aware that the recreational services provided by the parks are traditionally services used only by the wealthy. This is frustrating as the parks are free and are a wonderful resource in terms of education and health, but are nonetheless underutilized. It is a goal for the parks to reach more people in the Bay Area, but how this is to be accomplished is yet to be understood. Endangered Species Act The ESA provides a critical legal loophole that is one of the only ways to veto a demolition project. Should an area be proven to sustain a species in danger of extinction, then the area can be preserved in perpetuity so long as the service to the endangered species is maintained Critical Analysis/Moving Forward In terms of mapping the data, the first step ahead involves talking to David, the GIS guru in the Earth Systems library, to figure out the best/easiest GIS software to display the data points we have given it comes from an excel spreadsheet. After choosing a software we will need to choose a base map and the layers to go over it such as park lines and potentially including ecosystem boundaries. Each layer adds another potential facet to our analysis. The next step will involve transferring the data onto the map. The length and ease of this task are highly dependent on the software and our understanding of the software. The software can also either limit or inspire our potential visualizations. Another tool that Dave (our partner) has mentioned utilizing is Tableau, software that allows for the easy graphing and layout of excel data. It doesn’t do GIS mapping, but can create a variety of graphs that compare and contrast different aspects of the data. Dave has yet to fully detail his plans for using Tableau, but one of our team members has some experience with it. When we discuss and define what we want to use Tableau for, we will be able to produce the desired outputs in a fairly short time. Finally we will use the analysis functions provided in the software to reach conclusions about the data we currently have. We still want to continue reaching out to the few contacts who have yet to respond to our data requests, along with touching base with a contact that didn’t think they had data for the regions we’re focusing on. Though they insist on this, we feel that (politely) asking them to provide what camera trap data they do have couldn’t hurt. Since the camera trapping program is intended to result in a much larger-scale Wildlife Picture Index, having data a little outside our current parameters could still be useful. We may end up discovering important insights from the data anyway. Update on Project Activities
This week was one of the less intensive weeks of our quarter so far, as we did not take another trip down to Salinas. However, we have not let the project out of our working memory; we have been fleshing out our final survey draft and working out how to incorporate our potential GIS mapping technology without using a digital survey (we decided last week to use a physical handout as opposed to a Google form due to potential lack of residents’ cellular data). Jonathan suggested that we may be able to organize a conference call with current planning in order to add to our wealth of knowledge regarding the housing layout and zoning of the Alisal. However, as we all know, it is difficult to coordinate schedules, so we may not end up having this conversation. This is not a large issue at all, though, especially since we have so fortunately spoken to a wide variety of stakeholders, community members, and officials already. Today, two of our group members (and Emmanuel) took a trip to visit Professor Carol’s home in Carmel, where we enjoyed refreshments, a scenic tour of the residential area, and a home-cooked dinner. What We Observed and Learned Though we didn’t visit Salinas, our visit to Carmel shed a lot of light on our understanding of housing trends, historical segregation, and further motivated us about the significance of our work with the Alisal. In our residential tour of Carmel, Carol narrated comparisons and contrasts between her hometown and Salinas, as an expert of both regions. Both Carmel and Salinas feature very dense housing conditions with minimal, if any, space between units. However, the population density can not equate. As a beachy, wealthy, heavily- tourist destination, many of the homeowners purchase their beautiful properties, but leave it vacant for a majority of the year to live in their primary homes until the summer season. Homeowners have the privilege here to purchase 10 million dollar properties, tear them down, and rebuild them to be “quirky”, unique, and custom-designed. There is no underdevelopment, the small and windy roads are deemed “adorable”, houses are built around standing trees, parking is easy to find, the downtown area is packed with expensive retail stores and exclusively local restaurants- all clearly different characteristics that are or have ever been seen in Salinas. Why? As Carol articulates, “White people lived here on purpose.” Schools were made to segregate white children away from Italians and Mexicans. Schools were made to segregate white children away from minority residents that get pushed to marginalized locations, like the Alisal. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward It is not fair that some communities, such as Carmel, can live in such luxury while residents, in places like the Alisal, work to pack multiple families in rundown, substandard structures. With our understanding of the historical segregation that prompted this division, we have that much more passion and empathy moving forward with our work assessing the current housing conditions in Salinas. Everyone in our group is invested in our project and in supporting our community partners, which is definitely a huge, if not crucial, element to its success. We are grateful to be working with people like Carol and Jonathan who have clearly laid out why Salinas is a location worthy of attention, worthy of research, and worthy of community-based service. Moving into Week 7, we anticipate several busy meeting times, as we have to actually settle on a final survey, training module, and funding analysis, but this is work that we are ready and able to see to fruition. Update on Project Activities
We met on Sunday after our trip to San Francisco to debrief our experience. we were able to take an hour to kind of hash out next steps based on the information we collected during our SF trip. We realized that we needed to be more specific in our project and that the SFMTA really believes LTS is the primary metric they should use when evaluating bikeability in San Francisco. This team meeting was important because we are now narrowing down our focus for our scope of work. We ended up proposing to investigate how intersections in a supervisor district in SF have different bikeability ratings.We also ended up calling Janice on Friday for our check-in. During the meeting, we were able to figure out specific streets in District 6 that had great intersections and streets with poor intersections. Janice also suggested that we provide the SF Bicycle Coalition with a document describing Level of Traffic Stress (LTS) and the areas that LTS fails to address. She suggested that we could use data and information found in other bike ability metric studies to supplement our report on the weaker areas of LTS. This report would be helpful in holding SFMTA accountable for their use of LTS to evaluate bike safety and prompt them to consider other factors when doing so. We also met with David from the Stanford Geospatial Center on Friday. During this time, David showed us some good sources for GIS data online and suggested that we use Carto for displaying an interactive map that our community partner can use/share with the public. What We Observed and Learned The most important thing we learned and observed was that sometimes, community partners change plans and we have to be flexible and do it quickly to adjust to those changes effectively. We realize that at this point, we really need to start getting going on project components as we have been moving slowly along our project. Now that we have some clear deliverables, we can divide up the work accordingly and get things done quicker. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward The main priority for us is to assign which team members will research which pitfalls of LTS and put the information into our final document. This will be important as we enter the final stages of the quarter. Another thing we need to do is to really pick up our pace and perhaps have more frequent communications as we try to get more robust research and start putting the pieces together. Some of us will start to cobble together a base dataset with all pertinent street and intersection information for our GIS map. Then, we will be able to add other features to our dataset and equip our map with interactive features. Update on Project Activities
Two events dominated this past week - the Scope of Work presentation and our trip to San Francisco on Friday. We now better understand how the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) operate and what their needs are. At the same time, we have new questions about how to include equity, how to reach out to locals, and what format the map should be in. We will meet this Sunday to discuss additional research and field work needs. Later this week, we will also email Janice with the data we want from the SFMTA, call her with updates, and potentially meet with the Geospatial Center staff to discuss the map. What We Observed and Learned Overall, the consensus on our Scope of Work was to consider San Francisco’s diversity and unique context. For instance, language barriers might prevent Cantonese and Spanish speakers from engaging with bicycle projects and advocacy. Moreover, existing lifestyles are not always conducive to bicycling. Deland’s project on Broadway Street revealed that bicycling is a low priority for Chinatown residents. How can we account for these established preferences? Moreover, San Francisco is diverse socioeconomically. SFBC advocacy member Charles explained the need to tweak messaging when speaking to luxury condo owners versus single-room occupancy residents. This raises a crucial question: are bike, pedestrian, and transit resources being fairly distributed across the City’s cultural and socioeconomic groups? Low stress bicycling… for whom? Beyond equity, we must consider other non-infrastructure concerns, such as the hilly topography and windy weather. Additional suggestions included the using the Census Bureau’s “OnTheMap” service for traffic data, examining the purpose of bikeability metrics, and changing the metric’s name to be more intuitive or striking. Janice echoed the need to consider a range of issues in her email, commenting that we could consider adding land use, demographics, and danger hotspots to the Level of Traffic Stress (LTS) metric. An important element of our trip was experiencing San Francisco bicycling firsthand. A number of highlights stood out during our bike tour with Janice, as well as our trips to and from the Caltrain station. For instance, pavement quality along Townsend Street was a surprisingly important issue. The reason for the poor pavement was that Townsend is an “unaccepted street”, so the City leaves maintenance to nearby property owners. We also passed through San Francisco’s latest protected intersection, which was a joy to ride. However, because many other parts of our journey were exposed to traffic, the overall trip was stressful. This emphasizes the point that a bicycle trip is only as comfortable as its most stressful link, as well as the need for an extensive and well-connected network. During our trip with Janice, we encountered windy conditions and steep hills, both of which are elements of bikeability we should consider. Finally, the way back to the Caltrain station was quite scary. We took a route under the freeway, where there were no bike lanes at all for a long stretch. This highlights the need for wayfinding that can direct people to areas with better infrastructure. In our meetings with the SFBC and the SFMTA, we gained critical knowledge about how the two groups work. One of the SFBC advocacy team’s main functions is to keep track of infrastructure projects across the City. This need could shape how we create our map and our report. The second major function is to engage with members. In fact, most of Charles' activities that day involved meeting over coffee with Coalition members, spreading awareness about projects and asking them to participate in advocacy. Meanwhile, the SFMTA's main role as the handlers of transportation infrastructure money is to prioritize projects based on limited funding and to implement an overall strategy. This means that their decision-making tools are highly advanced, using both quantitative metrics like LTS, the high injury network, and connectivity as well as public input from meetings. We found out that LTS is in fact just one small part of the range of tools they use. In fact, Jamie called it "a blunt tool". Critical Analysis/Moving Forward This week, we gained valuable insights into bicycle advocacy and infrastructure from our trip, readings, and feedback. Firstly, we found there are a variety of barriers to improving bikeability, often because the intentions of policies and laws differ from implementation. For example, CEQA was intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in San Francisco was used to block all new bicycle infrastructure in the City for four years. This could, however, indicate a need for better preparation and accountability on the part of bike advocates and planners and the need to ensure people informed about the project beforehand. This is an important part of advocacy work. Additionally, we found that San Francisco’s Open Data policy does not actually mean all data is available. Most of the SFMTA’s data is actually not accessible, and making that data available would take time and effort that the Agency does not necessarily have. The lack of open and useable data on bicycling could impact citizens’ and government’s ability to analyze progress. Finally, just because San Francisco has a resolution to reach a 20% bicycle mode share by 2020 does not mean there is enough funding to achieve that. In fact, the 2013-2018 Bicycle Strategy acknowledges a significant funding gap in achieving 20% mode share. Additionally, we learned that city governance is a messy and not always transparent process, and much of it involves mediating the relationship between citizens and government. From the SFMTA meeting, Jamie Parks told us that gathering feedback from citizens is difficult, and that efforts to create public online forums have devolved into bickering. Mr. Parks argued that meeting face-to-face with people at public meetings is usually the best way to obtain feedback. On the flip side, disseminating government information to citizens is not easy. In addition to the barriers to maintaining open data, many of the SFMTA’s decision-making processes were unknown to us before we actually met with them. Though the Agency has an elaborate, computerized process for narrowing down future projects based on LTS, high injury networks, corridor studies, cost, connectivity, and demand, we did not know about this until the meeting. Nonprofit work is also about relationships - and it often means sitting in the complicated zone between citizens and government. The advocacy team’s two main roles - spreading awareness of bike projects and mobilizing the public to push for better projects - are related to the back and forth between these two groups. Being in this zone can lead to tension. Prior to our visit, the SFBC was engaging in a Twitter war with @SF311, a government agency, for blocking a bike path despite the protests of a person trying to bike through. The SFMTA was mistakenly tagged in this heated argument, angering some planners in the Agency. The SFBC is in a unique position for a nonprofit because it on good terms with the City government. The Coalition maneuver deftly in order to balance the demands of members and their relationship with the City. After the Twitter argument calmed down, they issued a quiet tweet apologizing to the SFMTA. Equity considerations were another important theme. How does bikeability fit into broader issues of gentrification, homelessness, equity? Charles and Julia of the SFBC consider their work to be part of much broader and interrelated issues of local governance, equity, and public space. However, there are sometimes conflicts. For example, homeless encampments block bike lanes at the Hairball, leading to a sensitive situation that the SFBC is unwilling to step into. What does this issue reveal about the broader complications with bicycle advocacy? The feedback we obtained will inform our project going forward. In terms of researching bikeability metrics, we now know that we will not necessarily replace LTS. If we decide not to replace it, we should at least suggest additions or tweaks to it, which can include equity and diversity, non-infrastructure concerns, hotspot and intersection analysis, local participation, and the high injury network. Moreover, now we better understand how the SFBC works, so we could potentially mold our work to better fit that. For example, they might use LTS to keep the SFMTA accountable. Right now, they usually use the high injury network to identify priorities. Creating a map that lets them track project progress and summarize past changes could be helpful, especially if it is layered with demographics, injury, land use, and participation tools. We also better understand our position relative to understanding hotspots and intersection safety, as well as researching equity concerns and find better ways for engaging with the public. Update on Project Activities
We met with our project partners, Adina and Chris, again this week to finalize the survey and handout, and start planning logistics for implementation. The meeting started by going over the project documents and equity reviews that Chris pointed us towards last week, as well as some extra research that members of the team conducted as well. We highlighted key points of the lit review we conducted, discussing how those points could inform our own project. We also started discussing distribution of the survey and information. We decided that having multiple methods of delivering the survey and relevant information was important to ensuring it was as accessible as possible. One of the projects we are considering taking on is making a short informational video to accompany a handout. We also discussed how to physically implement the survey, going over how to confirm connections with business organizations, and determining the actual process of asking people to conduct the survey. To establish field days, we are waiting on a couple of organizations and coalitions in the area and working out how to approach people and the mannerisms we should adopt. Since the meeting, over the course of the week we have finalized the survey— expanding it to about 30 questions that cover a broad scope of objective and opinion-based questions— and finished the handout— converting it to the tri-fold brochure featuring more visuals and graphics to make the survey and project more accessible. What We Observed and Learned From the 2014 LA Express Lane Survey, we learned that the project to institute tolled lanes was relatively successful and met most of its initial goals, although a long term assessment was lacking. Interestingly enough, the project was more successful on I-10 than on I-110, pointing to the possibility of different transit corridors having different purposes and thus different best strategies— one suspected cause was the quality of rideshare and bus programs on the different highways. There was not a noticeable time difference between the commute time of cars or public transit. Public transit ridership did increase by 27%, and after instituting tolling another 15%. Only ⅓ of the new drivers on the highways were in single occupancy vehicles. 40% of drivers agreed that tolling improved driving. Overall conclusions suggest that while the project improved public transit, it did not noticeably impact commute time, succeeding in some but not all of its goals. The project earned 24 million dollars, though it is unclear how much of that money then went into improving transit services. Similarly, it is also unclear of how many people used the discounted fastrak program for low income commuters, both questions that need further study to inform our own project. We also discussed the 2010 Equity Assessment conducted for the same project, which gave us an idea of the kinds of frameworks we might be able to use to discuss the results of our own survey. The 2010 Assessment divided equity into 3 dimensions— individual equity, group equity, and geographic equity— and 3 subcategories under each dimension— market, opportunity, and outcome. We plan on examining the assessment more as we more into the data analysis portion of our project to give us ideas on how to frame survey results. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Moving forward, the bulk of of our project will be to conduct the finalized survey, in order to determine the best practices for approaching our target audience of low-income working commuters. Throughout the next two to three weeks, we will focus on surveying along El Camino Real over the weekend and the Stanford campus over the weekdays when possible. We hope to establish connections with local businesses and community organizations, so as to truly grasp their employees’/ members’ perspective on the current traffic conditions along Highway 101 as well as their individual transportation needs. Logistically, we plan to schedule field days on which we, in groups of 2, will strategically visit businesses. As we desire to be considerate of our target audience’s schedule and workload, we plan to only visit businesses during their off peak hours and to offer a variety of options with which people can take the survey, especially if they’re interested in doing so, but busy at the moment. For example, between a link to an online survey, a pile of paper surveys, or an in-person survey, we will investigate which option is the most effective in number of responses as well as which option is the most effective in the comfort of the survey participant. Other considerations that we have considered in order to make the survey as accessible to people as possible, include: making a video for people to view as the topic of expressways may be unfamiliar territory for some, translating survey materials into other languages, and creating a tactile model for surveyors to explain the topic of expressways in person. By the end of our survey period we hope to ascertain which method achieves the greatest number of responses, taking into account that the method itself must be replicable by our community partners. |
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