Update on Project Activities
This week our team met to discuss our individual research findings. The information we found ranged from in-depth details about the bikeability metric that San Francisco uses called Level of Traffic Stress (LTS), other bikeability metrics from around the world, and the methods and tools we can utilize to map bikeability. We did not meet with our community partner representative, Janice Li, this past week, however, we have been in contact with her to check in with her and to finalize our scheduled plans for our upcoming meet-up on Friday, February 3. As previously planned, we will be taking our bikes on the CalTrain and we hope to take the 11:30 AM train so that we can arrive in time to get a tour of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition office and have the amazing opportunity to meet two community organizers--Julia and Charles. As soon as we are done exploring the office and receiving the vital information we need for this field day, we will head over to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency office and have an important meeting with urban planner Jamie Parks. Once we are done with our meeting, we will carry on with our team project activities and bike across San Francisco with Janice to get our own first-hand experience of what it is like to cycle in this particular major city. Because we our meeting in San Francisco in a matter of days, we have been reading the pamphlets and information Janice gave us last week, all of which will prepare us for biking in the city as well as inform us about any recent bicycling advocacy and efforts such as “SF Transformation.” We are currently confirming check-in dates for the upcoming weeks of February 13 and February 27 and look forward to contributing our own efforts into the work of the SF Bicycle Coalition. What We Observed and Learned As of now, we have read through The Official San Francisco Bike Guide 2nd Edition, SFBC Bicycle Rules of the Road, and the 2017 winter issue of SFBC Tube Times that Janice provided to us last week. Our project tasks include conducting a literature review of the history and methodology of LTS as a bikeability metric and exploring bikeability metrics that have been implemented in other cities so that we may be able to recommend and ultimately devise a new bikeability metric along with a map that we will present to our community partner. As a result, we divided up the necessary research and discovered new information regarding bikeability in urban centers that will certainly aid us in producing the most effective bikeability metric relevant to San Francisco. In terms of the Level of Traffic Stress that San Francisco has been using to assess comfort and connectivity analysis, we realize this system is far too qualitative to be used to implement new plans, routes, or even policies. The LTS maps we found were very helpful, however, because they highlighted the locations and areas where the four different levels of traffic stress were prevalent. We learned that the streets along Fisherman’s Wharf were characterized by the highest level of traffic stress, so we intend to focus on that area as a place for improvement in our future sample map. As for other bikeability metrics, we concentrated on Long Beach and Copenhagen--two cities that vary in terms of being bicycle-friendly. We discovered that Long Beach has implemented a system where bicycle riders can upload their own preferred routes online to be made readily available to the public and that Copenhagen uses telephone surveys as well as text-based SMS feedback from its very own citizens about the city’s bikeability, which we thought were aspects of the formation of their bikeability metrics that seemed very accessible to the public. We aim to further investigate this notion of accessibility and implement it within our own proposed plan. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward After having researched how cities around the world have constructed their own bike lane and metric systems, we have a better grip on our topic and hope to tackle it effectively as our first on-site trip will take place very soon. When we meet with the SFMTA city planners as well as the community organizers from the SF Bicycle Coalition that Janice will introduce us to, we want to clarify any questions we have regarding our tasks and duties, for we hope to be an invaluable contribution to their bikeability efforts. We believe we can make an impact on the future and advocacy efforts led by the SFBC, so we aim to be at their service by truly listening to the needs of our community partners so that we may deliver what they are looking for. In the meantime, besides informing ourselves on the basic structure of the San Francisco Bicycle Strategy, we hope to move forward by using the knowledge a couple of our team members gained in a mapping and GIS workshop in order to create proposed maps that demonstrate bikeability improvements that will make cycling a feasible and intriguing mode of transportation, for ultimately we intend to “promote the bicycle for everyday transportation” as the SFBC aims to do. How do we make sure our map conveys a clear message while also inviting further exploration? Do our community partners want something for the public, or a map that helps them locate new infrastructure? These are just a few of the questions we have as we try to critique the current LTS system and find ways that other metrics will be applicable to our area of interest, San Francisco. Update on Project Activities:
This week our team got to know each other and meet out community partner, Janice Li, a member of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. After meeting with Janice Li on Wednesday, the group established that we are going to make a trip to San Francisco on February 3rd. On this trip we are planning to take the Caltrain and bring our bikes to be able to understand the biking situation in San Francisco. We are still working out what we will be doing in the city, but to maximize our time we will be meeting with SFMTA city planners, visiting the SFBC office, doing bike ride around the city, and possibly meeting other organizations within the community. After interacting with Janice the five of us decided that we will meet on Fridays to work together on the project. In addition, we split up the work into researching several different aspects Janice listed for us to do research on from LTS methodology to mapping out a possible bikeability metric for San Francisco’s street network. Our group brings a variety of unique talents to the table as we are in a variety of different grades, have different major interests, and different strengths. What We Learned and Observed: This week Janice informed us about what the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is all about. This information ranged from her telling us about how many members there are (from the board to the staff and the community partners) more specifically she explained what she does for the non-profit organization. Janice Li is an advocacy director and focuses on grassroots leadership and the issue of affordable housing within community development. She mentioned that this organization was founded in 1971 and began with a small group of neighborhood bikers. Today, it is now one of the strongest bicycle advocacy organizations in the country. Although we were just assigned this project, our group is learning a lot about what defines sustainable biking situations ad how we can make biking a leading mode of transportation in all cities, but specifically San Francisco. Janice gave us several pieces of information to read up on including; The Official San Francisco Bike Guide 2nd Edition, SFBC Bicycle Rules of the Road, and a 2017 winter issue of SFBC Tube Times. From this information that was provided we learned the proper rules of riding a bicycle, the key to having a helmet and other necessary biking accessories, and other interesting topics such as what is coming soon to parts of San Francisco and how to bike with your dog. What we found interesting was that you do not have to be a expert biker to bike the streets of San Francisco and that they are trying to convey that biking can be for everyone and their different life styles. To promote this we learned that the SFBC puts on events where they close down a street and teach little kids how to bike, show parents that they can bike with multiple kids on their bike, learn the safety of biking, and more! Critical Analysis and Moving Forward: Our group could not be more excited about the project we have been given. We are looking forward to our trip into the city to meet the rest of Janice’s staff as well as SFMTA city planners and possible other community base organizations that SFBC works with. This week we are focusing our time on analyzing the information that we have been given and learning about how other cities around the world have constructed successful or possibly unsuccessful bike lanes. After learning about this we are going to study San Francisco’s LTS (levels of traffic stress) and compare it to other cities around the world to identify if San Francisco is getting its optimal usage out of its bicycle system or if other cities are doing things that San Francisco can incorporate into their methodology to improve it for those biking in the city. Furthermore, we are going to learn how to create a map of our findings to demonstrate the possibilities to improve on the bicycle methodology to potentially convince those in the city to use biking as their main transportation. Overall, our end goal is to identify the efficacy of LTS and see if other metrics that have been developed compare to the one implemented in San Francisco. Hopefully by the end of this project we can recommend other options to improve on the San Francisco LTS. Attached below is a current map of the San Francisco Biking network: https://www.sfmta.com/maps/san-francisco-bike-network-map Sustainable Cities is a service-learning course offered through the Program on Urban Studies and Earth Systems Program. Students learn and work collaboratively with Bay Area government agencies and community organizations to support their sustainability goals. Now in its sixth year, the class attracts undergraduate and graduate students from a multitude of disciplines, ranging from urban studies to civil and environmental engineering to law and public policy majors, to support clients on meaningful fieldwork-based projects.
The Winter 2015 class worked with five community partners on the following projects: 1) assessing feasibility of an equitable and integrated Bay Area public transportation fare structure - Friends of Caltrain; 2) mapping residential displacement and demographic shifts in San Mateo County - Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto; 3) developing a public engagement strategy for household hazardous waste disposal in the City of San Jose - Department of Environmental Services; 4) creating a toolkit for Women Bike SF to increase bike ridership in San Francisco - San Francisco Bicycle Coalition; 5) providing technical and policy analysis for the City of Oakland soft story retrofit program - Resilient Oakland Initiative. The final presentations took place on March 11, 2015 at Stanford University (Video). Final Steps
This week we focused on getting together our deliverables and putting the finishing touches on everything we committed to deliver. This ended up being a lot of data analysis and thinking about good ways to represent data. We also continued the development of our branding and began compiling our ArcGIS Map. ArcGIS Map: Katie met with David in the GIS lab on Friday to finalize data sources for the map. We will be using shapefiles from the SF Find maps to denote neighborhoods in our map. All the data from the surveys regarding geographical information is extracted and we are in the process of transferring that data to our GIS map. The layer of the map Katie is currently working on includes over 400 start and end points of the members' commutes to track which neighborhoods are most popular for bikers. The next layer which will be completed by Monday will include special routes. Survey Response Category (Qualitative) Analysis and Branding: One of the big goals this week was to analyze the write-in responses that we received from the survey we sent out to SFBC’s female members. The replies were in response to the question “Do you have any other comments on biking in SF or ideas to encourage women ridership in SF?” We received a variety of responses that varied significantly in subject matter. To better analyze the responses in order to extract valuable information from them, we did an initial read-through of the responses and came up with 8 categories of comments/ideas that arose frequently. After discussing the categories with Janice, we narrowed them down to the following six: 1) SAFETY: Infrastructure such as separated bike lanes and other measures to protect cyclists from automobiles. 2) BEHAVIOR: Tools to increase confidence and skills on the road, including workshops and classes. 3) COMMUNITY BUILDING: Facilitating friendships and support networks between female cyclists by making sure the existing bike community is more inclusive as well as also finding women-only spaces. 4) BUILDING BIKING INTO DAILY ROUTINE: This includes things like aesthetic/hygiene concerns and bike storage options/theft avoidance. 5) BIKE CLOTHING/GEAR 6) BIKE AND GEAR PURCHASING: In addition to help with buying bicycles, this includes things like helping women find friendly and helpful bike maintenance options. We are now in the process of taking a tally of the number of times each of the following categories come up, and will soon be better able to rank each of them by the number of times the survey responders brought them up. We also continued to develop our logo this week, receiving feedback from some additional members of the SFBC. We will contact a graphic designer this week and finalize the logo. We also drafted our mission statement this week, incorporating information from our discussion with Janice and from the focus groups, and we will continue to refine it and the other branding materials over the next few days. Quantitative Data Analysis: This week we finished processing the data from our surveys. The process of converting the information from our survey responses (about 400 replies!) into usable data was challenging. The biggest challenge was figuring out an appropriate way to represent qualitative responses such as: “not sure” or “somewhat encourages” into numbers that we could use to make graphs. We chose to focus this part of our data analysis on the set of questions that asked responders to rate potential ways to improve women ridership (social gatherings, guest speakers, skill-sharing workshops, regular bike rides, online discussion forum, and bike education). For these responses we paired each of the 4 possible responses with a number that illustrated something about how positively or negatively a responder endorsed an answer. For example we paired “doesn't encourage” with a numeric value of -1. We then used these numeric responses in order to graphically represent how our survey participants felt about specific ideas. Looking towards next week Final Presentation: The final presentation is less than a week away and we are very excited to show our community partners and peers what we have accomplished this quarter. Report: Our report which is a portion of our final deliverable will include all our survey data analysis, GIS map and findings, and final branding. Our aim is that the SFBC will use our recommendations and findings to further support their campaign and find our work useful in producing more components of a toolkit and resource guide. Website: The website is coming along and will hopefully be done not long after our final presentation. What we are doing:
Branding: This week we’ve continued to work on branding. Using the information we gained from the focus group last week regarding the draft of the logo we presented, we created updated drafts of the logo to be sent to Janice. Using the prefered blue/orange color scheme, we altered the font to be a bit less complicated and more readable, and incorporated the SFBC chain symbol into the drafts. Two of the four updated drafts are attached. We sent these updated versions to Janice and requested that she circulate them within the SFBC office, and ask for feedback. We specifically want to hear back on the following: color scheme, font, and symbol colors/size. We want to make it clear that this is just a draft and that all comments are welcome. We hope that people will have constructive commentary that will help us as we compile future drafts. Another thing we did this week regarding branding was synthesize the data that we got from the focus groups about merchandise that the participants are most interested in receiving. We asked them to choose and rank as many preferences as they wanted to out of a list we compiled of popular items. The list of items and the votes they received is as follows: T-shirts (6 votes) Visors Bike Seat Covers Stickers (5 votes) Baseball Caps i Water Bottles (6 votes) Helmet (2 votes) Totes (5 votes) Fanny Packs (2 votes) Jacket/Hoodie (focus group member addition) (2 votes) Gloves (member addition) (1 vote) The top choices were T-shirts, Water Bottles, Stickers, Totes. We’ll keep this in mind as we continue to develop the logo and think about the future of our branding efforts. Map/Data Analysis: This week we started pulling the survey data needed for the GIS map analysis and compiling it in it's own document. The data encompasses bike commute starting points, end points, and any other route specific information the members provided. This data will be used only for the GIS map and internally with the SFBC so we are taking the necessary steps to maintaining privacy. We are also looking at data sources to create the neighborhood layer in the GIS map since SF has very unique and distinct neighborhoods that aren't necessarily defined by the city maps. We have done some research and with the help of Janice to make sure our map accurately and effectively reflects the integrity of the San Francisco neighborhoods. For the data analysis, we are starting to look for key themes represented in the survey responses and will be further analyzing the data in comparison to the annual SFBC member survey to see if there are any changes or trends. Website: We have also started working on the Website. We talked to the SFBC about adding a women bike SF tab to their website, but they said their website editing software is too complicated so we decided to create our own website as a mockup of what the women bike SF tab could be. We looked at some reviews on two free websites hosting sites (weebly and squarespace) and decided on using squarespace. We have officially created a domain: WBSF.SQUARESPACE.COM. We have decided on what we are going to include in the website. For now we will include our ArcGIS map, our recommendation paper, background information about our project, and include the branding we have made. We have some aesthetic concerns about the website. We don’t have a lot of pictures of our group and we didn’t take too many pictures in San Francisco so we may need to borrow some of the SFBC’s pictures. What are we doing next: Branding: Regarding branding, we hope to hear back from Janice and the SFBC staff soon, and to use their feedback to further refine the logo. We also plan to get in touch with a few professional graphic designers in the later stages to provide feedback and help us finalize the logos. We also plan to begin drafting copy for the SFBC website that will be uploaded once they create a Women Bike SF section. We plan to begin working on a mission statement, as well as compiling information about the work/outreach that the initiative is doing. Website: The basic structure and major content of the website should be done by the end of next week. Map/data analysis: We will continue with a more in depth analysis and incorporate a cross question analysis as well. We will compile our findings and potentially create visually representations such as graphs and figures to include in our final recommendation report to the SFBC. On Monday, of the upcoming week, we will start inputting out data into the arcGIS software to provide more interpretations of the bike commute routes and identifying the neighborhoods that the SFBC should reach out to in their advocacy efforts. |
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