What we have been up to:
This week has been mostly receiving data from our survey through the San Francisco Bike Coalition (SFBC) and prepping for our trip to San Francisco. The survey for the SFBC was a huge success! We got about 400 responses, which represents a significant portion of :the women population that belongs to the SFBC. We have started reviewing the responses of the survey in order to pick out general themes from the responses. Other than the SFBC survey, we have also received some responses from The Women’s Building. Even though we didn’t get nearly the same amount of responses, these responses provided very unique perspectives from Women in San Francisco that don’t bike. The bulk of our work this week has been to prepare for our trip to the offices of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. We prepped question in order to guide the discussion with the participants. This Saturday we actually ran the focus groups, which consisted in two 90-minute sessions. The goals of our focus groups were to expand on some of the themes we noticed when reviewing the surveys and get feedback on some the branding we have developed. We had two 90 minute focus groups that included a variety of women. In the first focus group we had 3 women participate in our discussion and then we had 5 women (including our Professor) participate in the second group. The women who participated ranged quite widely in age (our oldest participant was in her 70s), most where young professionals, and some were moms. Our community partner, Janice Li, led the bulk of the focus group while we took detailed notes. At the end of our focus group we explained how their responses would help us develop our project and lead a discussion of some of our branding efforts. Our day with the SFBC ended with a discussion with our community partners about our plan for wrapping up our project in the coming weeks. What we have learned: Here we would like to present some of our main takeaways from the focus groups. Empowerment One of the most valuable takeaways from these focus groups was the women’s individual internal experience while biking, and the positive changes they felt in their identities and personalities after they began to bike around the city. The women often described a sense of freedom--as though all of San Francisco was suddenly unlocked and available to them for exploration and discovery. They talked about experiencing increased confidence and assertiveness after biking for a while--qualities that they carried into other areas of their lives. The women also discussed a sensation of strength. They feel physically capable, and generally stronger than they did before they started biking. All of these experiences are extremely important, and truly answer the question “why should we get more women on bikes.” Getting more women into an arena that is currently dominated by men opens the door to get them into even more arenas that are similarly male-heavy. The women are making their bodies and minds more resilient, and this is so critical in improving gender equality. Community Many women in both focus groups touched upon this idea of community. Some said they did not know a lot of women that they could bike with. They wished that biking could be the mechanism that brings like minded females together either through coffee chats, group rides, or some sort of social network. Us vs them mentality Several suggested one of the biggest barriers to getting more women on the road was concern for safety but more specifically the us vs. them mentality that has manifested in the dynamics between bikers and drivers. The women would like to see a shift in this negative culture that has erupted on the streets of San Francisco and likely many other places. Until that shift occurs, the women brought up something we have not thought about yet and that is to prepare by predicting what the cars are going to do. As you are biking, think about how cars drive and their predictable tendencies like stopping at lights and stop sign or turning and adjust your biking accordingly. This takes biking safety more into your hands. Better preparation for mentors Lastly, when the women were asked if they had ever attempted to get other women involved in biking, many said they were unsuccessful. It was for lack of trying or enthusiasm for biking in SF. However, they said it was more a difference of skill and they became intimidating to the people they were trying to encourage. This calls for preparing the women to be mentors. They need to learn to be aware of other’s level of biking and adjust their biking and teaching style to the beginner. They need to learn skills that suggest support rather than intimidation or being patronizing. This way it is a much more enjoyable time for the beginner and could encourage her to continue to bike. Our next steps: Branding: At the forum, we got the opportunity to show the women drafts of the logo we have been working on. The drafts had different color schemes and fonts, and after distributing the samples we opened up the floor for commentary on them. The women’s feedback was very helpful. We learned which color scheme they preferred and why, as well as whether or not they found the font to be readable enough. We also learned how they felt about the symbol we used, and what changes, if any, they thought needed to be made to make the logo more representative of the community and more appealing to the people we are trying to encourage to join. We found that women prefer the blue and orange color scheme the best, but that the font that we utilized primarily in the drafts can be a bit difficult to read. The women liked the symbol, although one participant felt that the graphic could be improved by adding overlapping spikes as opposed to ones that radiate from the center, each at their own angle. Next steps include developing a draft that incorporates this feedback, and giving it to Janice to be distributed to a wider audience for a second round of commentary. We also took the forum as an opportunity to distribute a short, informal survey regarding the gear/merchandise the women would be most interested in receiving. We asked them to rank their top choices, and out of a list that included over 10 possible items, stickers, water bottles, and totes were the most popular. We can use this information in designing this merchandise, and continuing the branding development. We also talked about creating copy that could be put on the SFBC website once they create a Women Bike SF section. This copy would include things like a mission statement, information about the work/outreach that the initiative is doing, and information about the importance of the initiative in the broader context of both biking and women’s empowerment. Surveys: We talked in depth with Janice about next steps for the survey that was distributed to the female SFBC members. We now have about 400 responses, and we felt it was important to learn exactly what information Janice wanted to get out of the data, and how she wanted it presented to her afterward. For some of the more open ended questions, we plan to create informative categories based on the responses we are seeing, and then to rank them in terms of the number of times they came up. Other information, such as that relating to demographic, will be put into charts that the SFBC can have in their records. The mapping information will be synthesized by the neighborhoods the participants referred to, and will be used in the creation of the GIS map. Mapping: Our next steps for mapping is to begin putting the geographical data from the surveys in arcGIS. Our main goals with the map is to visually map the most and least popular neighborhoods where female members bike. The SFBC will use this information to plan events and direct where they should focus their efforts to maintain membership and reach out to new ones. We plan on receiving help from the GIS library to discuss the best data files to base the map off of. Surveys, Branding, and Mapping, Oh My! Branding One component of our project that allows us to really explore our creativity, and has allowed Mia and Katie to utilize their graphic design skills is the branding kit that we are developing. The kit will eventually include a variety of elements--a logo, a mission statement, color and font specifications, a brochure, and perhaps even a short video on the project--but so far we’ve been mainly brainstorming and discussing the characteristics that we want our branding materials have, and the message that we want them to convey. So far, most of our efforts have come from drafting the logo. When the logo is finished, it will essentially be the face of this initiative, and will be representative of the work we are trying to accomplish, so it is important to us that a lot of thought and consideration go into its development. We decided a bit earlier on, with Janice’s help, to title our initiative “Women Bike SF” so Mia’s goal this past week was to toy around with the symbols and layouts that can be used to transform these three words into a memorable and aesthetically pleasing logo. Mia wanted to incorporate a bicycle wheel or two into the logo, but also wanted to include something that would express femininity or somehow promote women’s empowerment. Initially, she also wanted to include something symbolic of SF--such as the Golden Gate bridge or a cityscape. Eventually, Mia came up with the idea to merge the symbol of the bike wheel with the symbol for Venus, which is commonly associated with the female sex, and with feminism. With our brand’s main symbol in place, she then brainstormed how to include the “Women Bike SF” phrase in, or next to the symbol, and ended up placing it just beside it in block letters so that the significance and size of the symbol was maintained. Mia then experimented with different color schemes, and came up with the following prototypes: Next steps will include reaching final conclusions on the logo’s color scheme--perhaps via informal surveys and a vote taken at the focus groups we will conduct next week, and then moving on to the other branding components mentioned above. Deland, what do you think?
SFBC Survey/Mapping On February 10th, our first survey was sent out through the SFBC's weekly e-newsletter. This survey was only sent to SFBC members with the aim of collecting information about specific commutes, demographics, their opinions on why women are/are not biking, and what actions we can take to encourage more women to bike. The survey was received with immense interest. Within 24 hours we have received over 200 responses! We are excited to start combing through the data and using the responses to direct our project efforts. Specifically using the commute routes, we are planning to create a GIS map to identify popular routes, and key neighborhoods that have a substantial amount of female ridership as well as limited ridership in order to propose areas in which the SFBC could direct their efforts. Unfortunately, the survey responses do not include turn by turn directions for each route, only a start and end point. For the GIS map, we may refer to popular bike routes given the start and end points or we will have a more direct way of obtaining these routes during the focus groups, possibly the old fashioned way using paper maps and highlighter, and I will translate that to electronic form for the final map. Outreach Originally, our plan was to contact a bunch of different organizations in order to get information about women that don’t ride bike in San Francisco. Realizing that this was a very time consuming task we decided to contact The Women’s Building in San Francisco. The Women’s Building’s executive director, Teresa Mejia, was really interested in the project and agreed to help us. Since The Women’s Building is not allowed to send emails about anything other than their events, Ms.Mejia agreed to send out the survey to their 9 community partners. Since some of the community partners are primarily Spanish speakers we had to translate our surveys to Spanish. Even though Ana Sophia took care of this (since she is the only Spanish speaker) we realized how difficult is can be to translate some of the technical words we included in our survey. Another issue we encountered is thinking about what would be the best way to send our survey in order to reach out to the largest number of women. What we decided is that we will first try the online approach and send out the email on a google forms format. If we don’t get enough responses in that format we can try to make a trip to the Women’s Building and do in person surveys. We can coordinate this trip with the focus groups we will be holding on the 21st of February. Surveys:
After our discussion in class last week about the best approaches to conducting field interviews in a manner that is most respectful to the communities we’re engaging, we put great deal of thought into how to compile our surveys in a way that would help us get answers to the questions we had in a collaborative, non-invasive way. We also discussed which groups we should target to maintain diversity in our study and help to get responses that are as representative as possible of the groups we seek to gather information about. We compiled two surveys. The first one will be given to current female members of the SFBC. The purpose of this survey will be two-fold. The first goal is to track where these women are biking in the city. We will use this information to inform the toolkit by providing the SFBC with a better idea of where their female members are located and where they bike most frequently so that they can use such information to strengthen those communities, as well as to target ridership in geographic locations that are not well-represented in the data we collect. The second goal of the survey will be to understand these women’s motivation(s) for riding their bikes. Hopefully, such insight will give us ideas about ways we can engage and encourage the non-riding population. In compiling the SFBC survey, we began by including questions that will give us general background information on the women we are talking to, just so that we can get an idea of the demographic. After such questions, we asked questions to get an idea about the nature of their bike riding, to understand whether these women are biking recreationally, for commuting purposes, or both, and asked the women to describe the bike trips that they make most frequently. We followed this with questions regarding their motivation(s) for riding bicycles, with response options ranging from health-related reasons, to carbon footprint reduction. We included a wide range of options, but, as was the case with many questions, also included a fill in the blank “other” box to allow women to voice any options that we had failed to include. Lastly, we wanted to get a gauge on what SFBC events have been most popular with their female members, and to get an idea of which events are most effective at getting (and keeping) these women on their bikes. The second survey will be given to, hopefully, members of a variety of non-SFBC associated womens groups in San Francisco. The goal is to target women who do not ride bikes and to find out what SFBC can do to help them start cycling. Our aim is to understand what is preventing these women from biking, and what sort of programming SFBC could offer to encourage them to do so. As was the case in the previous survey, we began by collecting demographic information. We then asked questions regarding their regular modes of transportation to gain an understanding of how much these women bike currently, and to gauge their confidence level with bicycling. The remainder of the questions focused on factors that are preventing them from riding bikes, and resources/programming that would help alleviate their concerns. Once again, we often included the “other” option in order to give the participants an opportunity to answer questions in their own words. Overall, we tried our best to keep the surveys concise, out of respect for the participants’ time, and we phrased the questions in ways that we thought were accessible and straightforward. Now, we will work with Janice and other SFBC staff to refine the survey drafts and to prepare them for release in the near future. Outreach Efforts: In addition to working on our surveys, we began to contact organizations that may help us distribute our survey to women who are not biking in San Francisco. We did some preliminary searches for individual groups online and found that the search was taking quite long and was not producing the type of information we wanted. To save time and improve the quality of our search, we contacted larger organizations that may have a list of women’s groups in the area. This week we contacted The Women’s House in San Francisco and the Board of Supervisors. The idea of contacting these two organizations is that they could put us in contact with women’s groups that would be willing to fill out our survey. We had to consider a couple things when crafting our emails to these organization. For one, we had to consider how to address ourselves. We decided that we would refer to ourselves as Stanford student working with SFBC instead of just a member of SFBC. We did this to emphasize that there is an educational component to this project and to avoid any negative implication of being part of a larger organization. We also decided that it would be best not to include all the details of the project to avoid our email being deleted due to length. We are still waiting for a response, but if by Tuesday we do not hear back we have decided to call both organizations and request more information. If we want to further refine the women’s groups we are reaching out to, we could even email specific district supervisors in different districts we want to target. This will all depend on the response we get from The Women’s House and the Board of Supervisors. Next Steps: 1. Surveys As stated above, we sent our draft of the survey questions to Janice and they are currently being circulated amongst the SFBC staff working on the project in order for substantial feedback. We will make the necessary edits and put it into a google form by Monday so it will be ready to be delivered on Tuesday. After that, we anticipate about a week or so of a waiting period, but we will compile the survey data as it comes in so that we can start our analysis and GIS map. 2. Outreach We have received a response from the email we sent to The Women's House in San Francisco. They showed significant interest and we have made plans to discuss our project further on Monday morning through a phone conversation. Hopefully we will receive information regarding specific women's groups and their contact information so we can start delivering our second survey dedicated to women who don't already bike. 3. Happy Hour The SFBC is hosting a Women Love Bikes social mixer event in San Francisco on February 19th which Katie is going to attend. The purpose of the event is to bring together women in a casual environment to talk, make connections, and spread the word about this new women and bikes SFBC initiative. This women-focused evening is open to all bike lovers and the bike curious and will hopefully be a great opportunity to talk about our involvement in the project and receive valuable feedback. 4. Focus Groups On February 21, we are going to travel up to the city to conduct structured focus groups at the SFBC headquarters. We will facilitate two sessions throughout the afternoon with 5-10 women in each group depending on the interest. The information collected from the focus groups will be additional data to supplement the survey data. The groups may also give us information missed or not represented on the surveys. This week our class reached an exciting milestone where each team presented their project scope of work developed in collaboration with community partners. Each team described the background information for the project, their detailed plan for outreach and data collection, as well as the broader significance of the project within the context of Bay Area sustainability. From here on out, we plan to delve deeper into our projects and dive right into fieldwork! Janice picked us up from the Caltrain Station at 4th Street with our bikes and briefed us on the rules of the road in an urban setting. Our adventure then commenced. We first rode along Mission Bay on a multi-use path which means it is open to not just bikes, but also pedestrians, dogs, skateboards, etc. It was a pretty easy ride as long as we were courteous to other users. Then the real fun began. As we rode down Folsom St. we encountered several new elements: cars, buses, and rail road tracks. It was one of the busier areas of the city in terms of volume of cars and trucks. The bike lanes were useful but we had to deviate from the lane several times due to buses, trucks or cops blocking the bike lane. On this portion of the trip we had to be particularly aware of buses--especially when they stopped, crossing into the bike lane, and then when they left the bike lane to rejoin traffic. Next up on our trip was taking a ride down Market St., the Main Street of San Francisco. This street was equipped with wide buffered bike lanes, with a protective barrier from traffic. The lanes were also painted green and in some intersections there was even bike traffic signals. We still had to be cautious of sometimes passing busses but for the most part biking here felt relatively safe. After Market St. we headed to Duboce Path which led us directly to “The Wiggle”. Janice informed us this path was a vital component of San Francisco’s bicycle network because it was the flatest way to get from the Western neighborhoods to Market Street and Downtown. It is referred to as “The Wiggle” because it is a winding path along several streets that avoids some massive San Francisco hills. Next, Janice made sure to point out a new addition to the San Francisco bike infrastructure, contra flow lanes. These exist on one-way streets where there is a bike lane on each side one going with the flow of traffic, and one going the opposite direction, hence contra flow. These lanes were implemented to shorten the commute time on common paths for bikers by providing a more direct route. We then took a short break and stopped for a refreshing ice cream while Janice distributed some informational materials and debriefed us on the first leg of our journey. Our final leg of our path consisted of traveling back to Market St. to the San Francisco Bike Coalition’s headquarters. We arrived at the office, a little fatigued, but we had survived and were much more knowledgeable about biking in San Francisco. Some of the biggest takeaways from our excursion are:
Why Aren’t More Women Riding? Our Firsthand Experience: The bike ride around San Francisco gave us great insight into some of the difficulties female bike riders might face and making the trek first-hand helped us to come up with ideas of reasons that women bike ridership may not be as high as the SFBC would hope. Below are a few things we came up with that made our trek more difficult, based on our experience today: Insufficient knowledge of the city/navigation skills: Riding a bike in San Francisco requires your undivided attention. Unlike when commuting by car, when you’re on a bike trip, it is very dangerous to shift your attention from the road in front of you (say to a GPS device) or to even take the time to stop and think about where you need to go next. You must pay attention to not only cars and pedestrians, but to other cyclists, and rarely have the opportunity to navigate. If it hadn’t have been for Janice’s familiarity with the city as she led us around, we would have had a much more difficult time figuring out where we were going (which streets to turn on etc.) and such confusion/apprehension can be very dangerous when you’re on a bike. Confusion regarding bike traffic flow: Janice is very well-versed in the significance of “sharrows” and “bike boxes” painted on the road. However, for someone unfamiliar with what these symbols mean (someone like any of the three of us), it can be tricky to make sure you are following the rules of the road and staying in the properly designated areas--particularly when doing things such as turning into contra-flow lanes. Harassment: There were a few instances of cat-calling and other unwanted interactions/attention from male drivers/car passengers and pedestrians. Aside from being distracting and potentially dangerous, such events made the bike ride far less enjoyable. Intimidation by other cyclists: Cyclists can sometimes be aggressive, and particularly if you exhibit “newbie” behavior (riding slowly and cautiously) can be quite intimidating, speeding past you and such. Generally feeling unsafe or physically vulnerable: A few of us found it to be a relatively anxiety-inducing experience--particularly when we were travelling at night. A seasoned cyclist, Janice had the tendency to bike pretty fast, and it pushed a few of us out of our comfort zone. Feeling the need to be hyper-aware of your surroundings at all times, watching out for pot-holes, driver, cyclists, pedestrians, trolley tracks, etc. can be a very overwhelming experience. Impact on hygiene/aesthetic concerns: This one is not as big of a deal, but it is difficult to maintain a sense of “freshness” after biking up a steep hill, and generally getting hot and sweaty. Helmets also inhibit certain hairstyles, and impact all hair textures differently, which may dissuade some women from wearing them. Meeting the Team and Planning for the Future Our bike ride concluded at the San Francisco Bike Coalition headquarters. After a tour of the office, Janice introduced us to the rest of a team of women—Erin, Anna, and Ellie— who are FSBC employees and are involved in getting more women to ride bikes. They all introduced themselves, talked a bit about their backgrounds, and explained what got them involved in the project. A couple of the major themes that we noticed as the team introduced themselves were that they all got into cycling a bit later in life, starting casually and progressing to biking regularly. The all see biking as a form of empowerment. In order to brainstorm some ways to encourage women ridership they talked about their own experiences convincing other women to bike. They all had similar experiences with convincing other women in their lives to ride bikes: once they got a woman to start biking it was pretty easy to get them to continue biking. This insight will inform our tool kit. We may want to focus our attentions on getting women to have a pleasant first experience riding in SF. Ellie then explained to us a little more about their organization. We learned that they are mostly funded from membership and individual contributions, and that their members are mostly interested in FSBC’s political advocacy to improve biking infrastructure. We then moved on to talking about our project. It turns out they have already done some activities to engage women in biking like coffee chats and short film screenings, and we will definitely take these pilot events into account when we form our toolkit. When we talked about what else the toolkit should include, they made it clear that we should fit the toolkit’s contents to our own interests and areas of expertise, but they gave us a list of possible things we could work on. List of possible toolkit items: · Tailored recommendations for San Francisco · Map of where member women ride à talked about possibility of making GIS map · Online forum for women to talk about their experiences and talk to other women that bike · Information on where to concentrate their effort: · What kind of programing works · And what areas should target · Think about metrics to decide whether the program is succeeding · Branding Material · Methods for facilitating average ridership · Creating framework for women mentorship program · Surveying women that don’t bike and trying to figure out why · Finding out methods to target populations that generally don’t bike much · Ideas for fun activities · Web/digital component or booklet We concluded that we would definitely do the mapping aspect they suggested for the toolkit so we started developing action plans on how to do this. We concluded that the first thing we would have to do is send out a survey to send out to the SFBC’s female members to figure out where they commute. At the end of the meeting, our immediate action items were to write questions for a survey that we’ll be sending out to gauge bike ridership in two different areas and the factors that influence it, and figuring out scheduling regarding future visits up to the city. |
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