Update on Project Activities
This week was a busy week for Sam and Ma’ayan. A GIS heavy week, the two spent solid hours in the GIS lab finishing up the 1990, 2000, and 2008 maps for commuters residing near Caltrain stations. Although we still need to verify the results to make sure they make sense, we tackled two main obstacles this week: accounting for water within buffer radii, and normalizing their mode shares. The first obstacle, water, had been skewing the total amount of land within each buffer area, causing incorrect calculations for the mode shares. By subtracting the amount of water area from each buffer, the team was able to solve this issue. The second and more difficult obstacle was normalizing the mode shares. After an agonizing hour with Patricia of going over the data and trying to find what was throwing off the mode share percentages, we realized some block groups had zero Commuting Workers, which previously we had changed to one since we divided some values by this Commuting_Workers variable. Now, this change was taking its revenge as it mistakenly increased the weight of each block. In order to counter this, we normalized all of the various mode share percents, and thus made their sum equal to one. With these two issues tackled, the team sat down with Adina and found some anomalies in the data that now we must fix. As we finish our maps this weekend, we will pour over excel tables to see where we have some issues that need to be addressed. In addition, this week we also started collecting the data for workers employed around the Caltrain station. Using the Census Transportation Planning Tool, we have navigated through the website and collected the tables we need. This tool is incredibly powerful and has a whole trove of data we are excited to get our hands dirty with. Beyond just GIS things, this Monday we also attended the Palo Alto City Council meeting which voted on a potential TMA program and certain TDM measures. The Council unanimously approved to request proposals to explore a downtown Transportation Management Association; providing Caltrain Go Passes to City Hall workers willing to give up their parking permits; soliciting bids to dramatically expand the city's shuttle program, and piloting SAP’s “TwoGo” rideshare program, and also partnering with carsharing companies to increase their presence in the downtown area. This was Sam and Ma’ayan’s first City Council hearing, and the two were impressed with the turnout, and positive responses of the public commentary. Expecting more negativity and bashing, all of the individuals who spoke up during the commentary period were excited or happy about the TDM program, and had their suggestions or questions in regards to it. Ma’ayan asked some questions about the expanded shuttle service, and choice of ride-sharing company (TwoGo), which were politely answered by the City of Palo Alto staff. Overall, the Council meeting gave Sam and Ma’ayan a better idea of how their TDM study can fit into Palo Alto’s current needs to find out more about TDM programs. Specifically, the pair hopes to now focus on speaking more with city-wide TDM programs the are similar to the size and needs of Palo Alto’s. The City Council heard presentations about TDM from Google, Stanford, and the Contra Costa Centre, and some of the public commentary surrounded the fact the Palo Alto is not like any of these organizations in neither size nor funding mechanism. With that in mind, Ma’ayan and Sam are sending out their follow-up requests for interviews to TDM programs that are similar to Palo Alto’s circumstances. What We Observed and Learned This week was a very good week in terms of learning for Sam and Ma’ayan. Starting off with the Transform Summit, the team divided and conquered for various panels that would be relevant to the group. Ma’ayan attended the morning panel on TDM programs, which Adina was moderating. Matt Bronson from the City of San Mateo spoke about specific TDM measures that were developed in 2005, which requires all new developments in the city to enact some traffic mitigation and TDM measures in order to get approval to build. In addition, San Mateo is currently also rolling out a series of TDM measures for their downtown area, which were developed in 2009. After him, Jessica Sullivan of the City of Palo Alto gave a short presentation on the TDM Palo Alto is considering, which Sam and Ma’ayan both later heard the full version at the City Council meeting on Monday. Ann Cheng, from Transform, discussed the GreenTrip Planner program which helps cities, citizens, and develops see how much or how little parking their require in their building based on a number of different factors. In addition, GreenTrip encourages a series of various TDM measures to discourage driving and increase the mode share of alternate forms of transportation. Finally, Steve Rainey of Cities 21 spoke on some common TDM measures and potential future technologies. The session was particularly helpful to get a better understanding of some programs that are already in place, or in development around the Bay Area that tackle traffic demand. Sam attended a morning session titled “The Future of Silicon Valley Is Riding on Transit.” The presentation featured a panel of the heads of major transit providers, including the General Managers of BART and the VTA. Each panelist spoke briefly on the successes and challenges facing their respective agencies before opening to questions and discussion from the audience. These transit agencies--including Caltrain--are struggling with the ability to accommodate increased demand while providing access to the greatest percentage of the population. The class sessions this week were incredibly linked to Sam and Ma’ayan’s project-- Sustainable Transportation. First, Chris Lepe talked about future and planned projects around the Bay Area, which led to a short discussion between Sam and Ma’ayan about some of the challenges and opportunities for the City of San Jose in regards to their traffic demand management. Deland’s reflection session on Wednesday addressed some of the more philosophical questions regarding the role of TDMs and sustainable transportation, and the kinds of services they provide. This discussion between serving transit dependent people and serving the greatest amount of people is incredibly relevant for TDMs-- which are usually aimed at incentivizing alternate forms of transportation for people who otherwise would be driving. Rarely to TDMs aim to make commutes for transit-dependant people cheaper, although often inadvertently they achieve just that. After Deland’s wrap up session, Brodie Hamilton discussed Stanford’s TDM programs, which was insightful for Ma’ayan and Sam to see a “best case scenario”, of a major employer with lots of financing, freedom, and room to experiment/ try new things in regards to their programs. Stanford’s CAPRI program, for example, was particularly interesting as it is quite effective, fun, and innovative. Although hard to implement for larger areas with potential security pushback from residents and more exits/ entrances, the program is nonetheless impressive. Moving Forward Moving forward, this weekend Ma’ayan and Sam have divvied up their work to make a final big push on their project. We plan to gather 2013 data, and also map that for people who live around the Caltrain stations. We also plan to finish the map for individuals who work around the Caltrain station. The team will transcribe their two TDM interviews, and send more follow-up emails/ confirm interview times. Although these are big goals, since we now have a good methodology with all of the kinks sorted out for creating the different maps, we believe we can accomplish all of these last goals this weekend so to work on our website next week and start summarizing our findings! Descriptive (Eric)
This week proved extremely useful for our group in planning and organization for our project. In the coming week we will be quite busy working on organizing data from our surveys and workshop at Lawton Middle School, which proved to be extremely valuable. Using the discussion from class on Wednesday we were able to structure group dynamics even more so. Laetitia created a Calendar and time sheet for the group in which we laid out each of our schedules for the upcoming week and coordinated times in which we can all meet in person and discuss the project as a whole. Throughout the project we have been using group-text to stay in communication when meeting in person is not an option. This has been a great tool for all of us in staying on track for the project and coordination when meeting up in San Francisco. This week we will primarily focus on putting data from surveys in written form and responding to/inviting our contacts to the final presentation. A rough outline of a street map will also be in the works for this week as well as continued modification to our design ideas from recommendations and information provided to us by Nicole from Walk SF. Nicole actually provided a pamphlet for us that contains statistical numbers of pedestrian-car accidents, city goals, and increased pedestrian travel numbers, all of which will be incorporated into our final presentation. As a group we discussed the importance of each section of our presentation and determined that we should spend a major chunk discussing street design and the ideas we have on improvement. We will also spend a portion of the presentation discussing what was learned while completing this project, both about sustainability and working with community members and planners to complete such an important project. Janice continues to provide us with valuable contacts and information which we are very grateful for. Recently linking us to a Erica Simmons’ (an Intern from the Bicycle Coalition) blog of West Golden Gate Park and her findings/research on bicycle and pedestrian safety in that area. In addition to this, Janice also condensed and modified our Survey which she plans on putting in the weekly newsletter for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, along with an invite to the final presentation. We continue to take major steps in completing our project and are very excited to see all of our work finalized. So much has been learned throughout this quarter already and we are anticipating amazing final presentations from all four groups. Interpretive (Amy) This week was very much a planning and working week. We covered a lot of administrative business which, although tedious in the moment, is fundamental to thorough project deliverables. As described above, our work this week consisted primarily of sifting through all our outreach responses and codifying this data. We are organizing the data by similarity of responses, usefulness of the information, and general relevancy of the responses. We are finding this to be a challenging step because we have gathered so much information at this point. Our outreach has been extensive--interceptor interviews in Golden Gate Park, in-person interviews at the SF Bike Coalition headquarters, a design workshop at Lawton Middle School, an online survey to about five neighborhood groups in the Sunset District, and another online survey to the SF Bike Coalition. We are being very vigilant and discerning about which information is actually helpful and/or which we would like to use in our final presentation. With the time and interest constraints of our short presentation, we have to continually engage the audience while still reporting back our most significant findings. Finding this balance will take trial and error in the preparation stage, and by clearly compartmentalizing our data we hope to make the compilation of our presentation easier. Furthermore, we need to undergo this stage anyway to organize the wealth of data we have gathered. In general, the response rate to our online surveys has been disappointing. We have only received 9 responses to the survey we sent out via SurveyMonkey to the five organizations in the Sunset District. This speaks to the power of in-person interviews, especially in the information age when people’s inboxes are overwhelmed with various asks. Ideally, we would have hosted another workshop or neighborhood forum if we were not restricted by the timing of a 10-week quarter. That being said, we are very pleased with the results of our in-person interviews and the workshop at Lawton Middle School. Those opportunities to engage face-to-face were invaluable to receiving candid input to our project from the locals who know the area the best. As outlined below, we have devised a timeline for the remaining two weeks of our project, including an initial outline sketch for our final presentation. After completing these planning measures, we feel a bit more secure in the direction of this final project push. Laying out the work that must be completed and assigning each group members necessary tasks to complete is the first step to systematically tackling our to-do list. Although we believe we have been relatively well organized throughout the quarter, coming up with a weekly to-do list may have been a more effective strategy from the start. Speaking of strategizing, we really appreciated the teamwork reflection activity we completed in class this week. It was a good opportunity to reflect on our group cohesion and make some slight changes which will help us in these final weeks. General areas of improvement for the group include being realistic about our project scope, planning ahead so we can alleviate scheduling conflicts, and being more vocal about our group work and concerns. We agreed that we could be more responsive to our community partners, which may be facilitated by assigning a group spokesperson. In order to assist with these improvements, we made a When2Meet online calendar for the next two weeks with all our available times listed, and decided that even quick in-person meetings are more effective than email chains and Google Docs. It is never too late to make improvements, so we implemented these right away. We are grateful for the opportunity to come together as a group and positively reflect on our experiences. Applicative (Laetitia) We will be spending the first half of the next week gathering, coding, and analyzing the results from all of our surveys and interviews completed throughout the second half of the quarter. This will include a short survey sent to the parents of the 8th grade Lawton Middle School students, as well as a short interactive online exercise for Mr. Streepy’s second class, which we did not have the opportunity to lead our design workshop with. The survey and interview results we expect to gather are from the following groups/categories:
We will also follow up with correspondents from throughout the quarter, such as Alex Cain in the Sunset District and Ben Grant of SPUR, giving updates and asking for any last bits of feedback they may want to share with us. We will additionally extend an invitation to our final presentation to all of our community contacts from throughout the quarter. Much of the next week will be spent devising initial design implementations for the Lincoln Way intersections and the Panhandle cyclist crossing into Golden Gate Park, informed by the survey and interview results from the past several weeks. By Monday class, we will have individually grouped our primary intersections of focus according to their similarities in constraints and design shortcomings. We will gather to compare conclusions and reach a group consensus on three (or four maximum) groups. Eric will spend the weekend organizing the Lawton Middle School students’ design ideas that they mapped out on the handouts and discussed during the workshop. The entire group will peruse the design resources provided by Nicole of Walk SF. The three of us have filled a When2Meet and scheduled times outside of class when we’ll meet in person to complete tasks that we won’t be able to do individually. This was a particularly timely effort for the Wednesday reflection activity, as we had agreed that a big obstacle to overcome would be figuring out times that we would set apart exclusively for the project:
Focus Groups at FOHC This week we conducted two focus groups at Fair Oaks Health Center (FOHC). These hour-long sessions aimed at soliciting the views of clinic staff and patients of a potential FOHC farmers market. We spoke with 14 staff members who hold a variety of roles at the clinic. Six patients, including two young boys, braved the pouring rain to join us for the second session the following day. We structured the focus groups to flesh out the patient and staff responses recorded in our ever-increasing cache of surveys. The conversations covered participants’ produce consumption habits, their visions for a FOHC farmers market, and the times and days when they’d be most likely to attend such a market. Most participants expressed enthusiasm for the idea of a farmers market. Patient participants stressed the health benefits from eating more fresh fruits and vegetables. They suggested that the weekend would be the most convenient time since they work during the day. Staff liked the idea of having a farmers market just outside their front door and noted that a farmers market would be a natural extension of FOHC’s community health mission. Both groups said that fresh produce is often expensive, and so affordability would be an important factor in whether they shopped at the market. The picture below is from the staff focus group. Creating Space for Creativity Leading focus groups is hard. Even though all of the participants in our sessions attended because they are interested in our project, it’s still difficult to craft non-leading questions that encourage people to think both creatively and practically. We drew some inspiration from the examples of participatory planning that we’ve seen throughout the term. Most recently, we attended a presentation by James Rojas, founder of Place It! (http://www.placeit.org/). Mr. Rojas provides participants with a random assortment of inexpensive items – foam blocks, monopoly money, plastic Elmo figurines, cloth leaves, construction paper – and asks them to design livable urban environments. The very motley-ness of the objects frees participants to set aside any expectation that their creation might look “right” and instead focus on the act of creating. We asked participants to draw their ideal FOHC farmers market on a blank sheet of paper. The results, one of which is shown below, fueled some great discussion. We also provided staff participants with a map of FOHC that we had designed. We asked staff to locate their ideal market on the map. This exercise generated some helpful feedback, but it suffered from a severe problem: the maps weren’t accurate. The farmers market is unlikely to start until the old clinic that currently squats on the northern half of the FOHC parcel is demolished. The maps that we handed out included the old clinic and so didn’t help staff imagine what the space would look like once the old clinic comes down. We opted not to use the maps in the patient group.
“Lo que comes, lo que eres” It was particularly exciting to participate in the patient focus group, which Sophie conducted entirely in Spanish. These folks made an extra effort to come out and share their thoughts with us. One participant even offered to help us create posters to help advertise the market to the community. Patients cared because their health and the health of their families matters deeply to them. As one participant noted, “Lo que comes, lo que eres” (You are what you eat.). Our interactions with patients and staff have confirmed that there is a demand for fresh, affordable produce in North Fair Oaks. Our next step is to translate the data that we’ve gathered into a form that enables FOHC to decide on the most effective way to meet that demand. |
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