I. Update on Project Activities:
This week, after meeting our community partner, Janice, and learning about the SF Bicycle Coalition and the project we will be working on, we met to brainstorm about our project’s trajectory, to sync our schedules, and to generally get to know each other better. We discussed our strengths and areas of expertise as they relate to our project, and found that we possess a diverse array of skills that will come in handy for this project. For instance, Katie and Mia have experience with graphic design, and have worked on projects involving community outreach and event planning, While Ana Sophia has experience and knowledge surrounding behavior-change programs. During our meeting, the three of us set a few basic deadlines, and scheduled group meetings that will occur over the next several weeks. We also clarified transportation plans for our upcoming visit to San Francisco, which will take place next Friday, January 20th. Most importantly, we developed a list of questions to ask our community partner, Janice, that will help us to gain a better understanding of her expectations, as well as of the project’s general scope and objectives. We emailed the list to Janice, and Mia will meet with Janice this Saturday to discuss these questions in person. The list of inquiries is as follows: 1. What are Janice’s expectations for the toolkit?
3. What is the objective of the toolkit? Are we creating a roadmap for starting a Women on Bicycles program that someone else will use later on? Or are we implementing the program ourselves? 4. How do the focus groups relate to the toolkit? 5. What is the research component?
7. What is the general development and completion timeline for each component of the project? Some of our key goals for Saturday’s conversation are to clarify the project components, and to ensure that Janice has a firm understanding of the skillsets that each of us have to offer. We are excited to hit the ground running with our project and have already begun to brainstorm for our Project Scope of Work. II. What was Observed and Learned: Who is the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and what do they do? The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is a member driven non-profit with a 10,000 current and active membership base. They were established in 1971 and their mission is to transform San Francisco’s streets and neighborhoods into more livable and safe places by promoting the bicycle for everyday transportation. Why do they want to increase the number of women on bikes? There were several motivations for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition to focus on women and biking and create this project for us to get involved in:
These lead to the driving question and purpose of the project: How do we get more women on bikes in San Francisco? Currently, our plan is to create our toolkit by drawing upon existing women-focused bike programs for inspiration. These programs include the Washington Bay Area Association Women & Bikes initiative, the Women Bike PHL, created by the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, and the WE Bike NYC campaign. III. Critical Analysis: The first week of class we looked at sustainable cities with a very multi-disciplinary lense. Not only did we evaluate a city’s sustainability by looking at its impact on the environment, but also by focusing on its impact on its community members. We will take the same approach in our project as we look at women’s bicycle ridership from a combined social, scientific, and environmental perspective. There are very tangible benefits to encouraging bicycle ridership amongst women. These include increased health for women, lower environmental impact, and reduced traffic congestion. Unfortunately, there are several barriers to women’s ridership as well, and these are less tangible, ranging from machismo and the cultural role of women in society to safety concerns and convenience. The League of American Bicyclists suggests that a good way to increase women’s ridership is to focus on improving convenience, increasing women-oriented consumer products, increasing confidence amongst women, and building a community of women bikers. Regrettably, even if our group addresses all 5 of the the league of American Bicyclists suggestions, we can still expect to receive some cultural pushback from women in America. According to an article in The Guardian, “despite years of progress, American women’s lives are still disproportionately filled with driving children around, getting groceries, and doing other household chores – housework that doesn’t lend itself easily to two-wheeled transportation.” American society is simply not yet conducive to women’s bicycle ridership! Thus, we predict that such cultural issues will be one of the biggest challenges we will face in our project, but we look forward to tackling it head on. Until next week, Ana Sophia, Katie, and Mia Descriptive
We have reached the final phase of our project! This week we dove full-court-press into preparing our final presentation and more importantly, the design recommendations that constitute the bulk of our project. In order to do that, we spent a good deal of time coding and analyzing all the outreach material we have gathered thus far. In order to do this, we stuck adamantly to our timelines and deadlines and split up the work so that each person completed equally weighted tasks. First, we sifted through all the interviews and surveys we have administered. We typed up all the SF Bicycle Coalition member interview notes as well as the Golden Gate Park interceptor surveys. This took a fair amount of time, especially transcribing the lengthy in-person interviews from their recorded form. We also inputted our online surveys into spreadsheets where the information is clearly accessible and legible. These processes helped us visualize the information so we could discern trends and patterns in our gathered information. Specifically, we were always harkening back to our major project questions: By what means and through which entrances do San Franciscans enter Golden Gate Park? How effective are these transit options and how can they be improved? We believe we discovered some key information from our outreach, which will be discussed below. We also transcribed the workshop materials from Lawton Middle School, where we had asked each student to design on a map their proposed improvements to the 34th and Lincoln intersection. To further our involvement with Lawton Middle School, we created an online survey for Mr. Streepy to distribute to his other 8th grade classes to whom we didn’t present. Although we’re running short on time, we hope this yields some additional information before our final presentation. In terms of the actual design recommendations, we devised our preliminary list of design recs right on schedule for Week 9. We plan to have this list finalized by Sunday night so we can send it to Janice for approval. Our list consists of three major sections: “compulsory” recommendations which we feel are most important and efficient to improving the existing conditions, a menu of further recommendations which improve upon the baseline list, and a complete street road diet. Dividing our recs up into these three sections helped us compartmentalize all our ideas and streamline the many recommendations we’ve envisioned so far. We are currently creating visual and multimedia designs so that we can demonstrate these designs most effectively and engagingly during our presentation. To that end, we have started to create the presentation itself so that we have plenty of time to practice it before Wednesday. We determined which member will present which section, and allocated a time slot to each part. We expect these time slots to be fairly rigid so we can include all the necessary information within the confines of the presentation. Looking forward to Wednesday, we have created a timeline for the work we will accomplish each day so that we stay focused and on track. Interpretive & Applicative We have decided to concentrate on three entrances along Lincoln Way, applying our design recommendations to 34th, 19th, and 7th Avenue and Lincoln. Meeting for several hours a day before our final presentation will allow us to fully develop our recommendations for the entrances and Lincoln Way itself. We will also tend to a range of recommendations for the entire boulevard and the Panhandle entrance recommendations for cyclists. This week’s activities and group meetings have proven very valuable to us as a group. With the ability to capitalize on class time to bring in our project details, we were able to establish an order of presentation goals and the amount of time we plan on spending on each. We plan on spending 2-3minutes giving a summary and project description along with a timeline and introduction of Community partners. In this section we will introduce Janice, Mrs. Tang, The SF bicycle coalition, and walk SF. This Section will be presented by Eric Laetitia will discuss our outreach techniques and involvement in the community in a 2-3 minute period as well, also doing the majority of the Sketchup designs and formatting of the powerpoint. These two sections will prove very valuable in both highlighting key quotes and interviews we were able to conduct throughout the project. The Sketchup designs will provide for a visual of our implementations and design ideas for each intersection. We learned through the numerous presentations by individuals like Chris Lepe, that visuals are more powerful in a PowerPoint than general statistics and wording. Amy will be in charge of design recommendations, implementations, and overall guidelines of these design ideas. This portion of our presentation will take the most time and allow for the most detail. We agreed as a group on all three sections of the project and have a strong and structured plan as to how we will be presenting. Something of concern we discussed was the possibility that our project could turn into the regurgitation of information from community partners and members of the community we have worked with. To prevent this we will be focusing on important quotes from these sources that will support our original ideas and newly formed ones without lacking interpretation of the information we have received. The remainder of the time will go to thanks and what we learned about service learning and will be the portion of the project we present collaboratively. With very structured goals for each day, we will be able to put together a very concise presentation. 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:
Descriptive
We had a busy and productive Week 7 and accomplished the goals we set out last week. We are in good standing to complete our project in two week’s time. Our work this week was characterized by on-the-ground action and fieldwork. Last Sunday, we allocated a day to complete our interceptor interviews of parkgoers in Golden Gate Park. This was a fascinating experience in which we approached passerbys along the Lincoln Way sidewalk and in the immediate park vicinity to determine their frequent access routes and transit methods into the park. We stationed ourselves at the major intersections we are focusing along Lincoln Way, especially 34th and Lincoln, where we could catch pedestrians as they entered the park. This ensured that they would have a relevant experience about pedestrian access, as they had just crossed the busy Lincoln Way on foot. There is also a meandering dog walking and jogging path in the park, between Lincoln Way and MLK Drive. We spent a good deal of time along this strip stopping pedestrians. In each case, we would approach a pedestrian and briefly introduce our project, saying something like, “Hello, we are a group of Stanford students working on a project to increase bike and pedestrian access to Golden Gate Park. Do you have two minutes to answer a few questions?” This was a generally successful approach, although a few people flat-out denied our request. Our questions were as follows: -Are you a resident of the Sunset District? If yes, how long have you lived here?-How often do you visit the park? -Which entrances do you typically use to enter the park? -What modes of transportation do you typically use to access the park? -Please describe your experience as a pedestrian along Lincoln Way. -What would you like to see improved to enhance your pedestrian experience? These interviews focused mostly on pedestrians, as cyclists were actively cycling and were hard to stop. In general, we found that Lincoln Way is avidly used by the residents of the Sunset District to access the park simply because it is the most convenient route into the park. In fact, the people we interviewed represented a diverse array of demographics but each reported a similar story: they visit the park frequently via the simplest route. While these routes may not be the safest, the pedestrians are still glad to have any park access. More analysis of these interviews will follow below. On Friday, we had another big day in San Francisco. In the morning, we taught a workshop-based class for Mr. Stuart Streepy’s 8th grade Social Studies class at Lawton Alternative Middle School. We modified our midterm presentation for the class, editing it to be more relevant for the audience. After introducing our project, we paused to have a brainstorming session with the class about their biking and pedestrian experiences in the city, especially in the Sunset District. We gathered a lot of helpful information from the students, who were very excited about our work and had fresh ideas. We polled the class using a version of the questions listed above, including how often they visit the park and by what means. The students are frequent parkgoers, and by every means of transportation, especially biking and walking. We then introduced some design concepts that can be applied for traffic calming and street revitalization to give the students some background to basic street design principles. In the style of a charette, we split the class into groups of three and four, giving each student a blank map of the intersection at 34th and Lincoln and some colored pencils. The students came up with their own design recommendations, some of which were very innovative (a raised bridge seemed to be the most popular idea!). Each group reported back, and we debriefed from the exercise. We are very grateful to Mr. Streepy as well as to Lisa Periera, a mother at Lawton Middle School who helped organize our workshop. After visiting Lawton, we made our way across town to the SF Bicycle Coalition Headquarters, where we met up with Janice again. At the office, we engaged in three interviews with members of the SF Bike Coalition who had volunteered their time to speak with us. This was very enlightening and gave us the opportunity to ask long-time city bikers about their visions for bike accessible streets as well as their thoughts on bike deterrents. One of the interviewees founded a bike advocacy group called Wheel Kids, which hosts summer camps for children to learn about bike safety and participate in fun biking activities. It was helpful to widen our outreach base and make these important connections. Finally, we met with Nicole Schneider of Walk SF, a pedestrian safety nonprofit which does great work in the city advocating for better walking experience. She directed us to some key resources, such as the MTA’s traffic control data, the benefits of road diets, the pedbikesafe.org countermeasures site, and the Transit Effectiveness Program, among others. She helped us brainstorm some creative design concepts which we hadn’t thought about before. It was a stellar end to an active day! Other than our day trips, we are also steadily receiving results from our online surveys and are starting to code all this data into a cohesive and comprehensible format. Interpretive Our interceptor surveys in Golden Gate Park last week allowed us to have direct contact with various residents of the Sunset District within Golden Gate Park. We interviewed a young European male pursuing studies at the University of San Francisco, and an elderly man who had lived in the Sunset District for more than forty years and walked his dog in the park every day. We also spoke to a middle aged woman who worked at the Stanford Medical School and strolled through the park with her young son as well as a couple with an infant and dog that had once lived on the northern side of the park and were just about to cross into the park from the Sunset District, where they had been living for a decade. They all agreed that they would benefit from improving the entrances along Lincoln Way, and had their own individual perspectives drawing from their personal experiences crossing the intersection. The family of three mentioned that the Fulton access to the park was even less pleasant than our area of study, pinpointing the lack of entrances along the northern perimeter of the park. When we spoke to Janice between our SF Bicycle Coalition member interviews this afternoon and made note of their comment, she stated ‘people will use the entrances where they are placed, even if the infrastructure is lacking.’ She further elaborated that within the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition projects, it was invariably true that placing bike lanes within the city and placing safe, intuitive, and bike lanes within the city were two different projects. Janice’s comment related strongly to our workshop with the Lawton Middle School 8th Graders, whose design ideas ranged far and wide, and sometimes very pragmatically opposed the design ideas we had been discussing with experts over the past few weeks. For example, when we mentioned bulb outs, an extroverted student exclaimed that they interrupted his skateboarding and frequently caused him to trip whenever he was gliding down the street. The founder of Wheel Kids, Tim Hurley, himself later stated that he was not a big fan of bulbouts as well as a bicyclist, for the very same reason that the middle schoolers had mentioned. Nicole provided us with an amazing list of resources to supplement the reflections and recommendations we had received today from the different community members. One that stood out was the pedestrian hybrid beam (PHB), a sign of a bright neon color that flashes to stop oncoming traffic when activated by a pedestrian. The PHB was first introduced to San Francisco by Supervisor Tang herself, providing a serendipitous moment of cohesiveness where we were consciously reminded of how much of a collective effort this project has been. Applicative From this point in our project we have gathered extremely valuable data for taking the remaining steps toward completion. As stated above, we have received a wide range of data from many different groups of people; business owners, commissioners and supervisors, middle age park goers, and children from the Sunset District. As well as collected first hand accounts in navigation of the park and surrounding areas by visiting the site multiple times. Today proved extremely valuable in gathering information from children in the area that may have or may not have truly thought about the danger surrounding entering the park, but to our surprise the children seemed to be on the same page as we are. We hope to really capitalize on the fact that all demographics of people in this area seem to hold a uniform view of accessing the park and the unsafe conditions that come with this task. This uniform idea will prove of great importance in stressing the necessity and validity of our project and we will definitely incorporate all of the data we are able to collect during this process. Another aspect of this week that will be incorporated into our project is the data collected from the interceptor surveys we were able to conduct last sunday. These surveys were extremely informative as to the general opinion people hold of pedestrian accessibility. We found that community members of Lincoln Way found it very difficult to cross the streets and the safety regulations currently in place just do not suffice. This corresponds directly with what we hypothesized would be the response from the community members of the Sunset District, but definitely adds a lot of strength to our project. Having the opportunity to meet with people like Nicole Schneider of Walk SF always amazing. The professional insight is priceless for developing our project, and as stated above, in meeting with Nicole we were able to learn the benefits of road diets, gain access to MTA traffic control data, and brainstorm design concepts which we had not previously considered. This information and insight will be incorporated into our project design as well as contribute to the portion of our project representing how concerned people are about pedestrian safety, and the willingness they show in helping our project anyway they can. With the combination of the middle school childrens outlook and first hand accounts and the professional insight from members of the community and organizations like Nicole from Walk SF, we will be able to look at our project through yet another lense. The many different views we will be decoding will set us up for an extremely thorough and well rounded project proposal. We could not be more excited to not only be helping the Sunset district and other surrounding communities, but interacting with the people and creating valuable relationships. Descriptive
This week was very informative for us as a class and as a group in particular. Having the opportunity to explore the Y2E2 building with Jiffy Vermylen as our tour guide we were able to learn numerous things about sustainability and setting a blueprint for similar projects to follow. In this case the project so to speak, was creating a building that would run off of significantly less energy and embody a passive use of energy and resources (water, heat, etc.) We learned that this building set a blueprint for the remainder of buildings in the Engineering quad, as well as shed new light on how we can conduct our project. We not only spent time learning about new ways to approach our project, but also received feedback from Outer Sunsent Merchant and Professional Association from the surveys we sent out. We are looking forward to receiving more replies from our other contacts and will be reaching out to two more contacts appointed to us by Dyanna. One of these contacts being Lisa E.J. Pereira who has been in touch with an 8th grade school teacher from Lawton Middle School. This teacher and her students are extremely concerned about pedestrian safety especially on 34th and Lincoln and are willing to hold a workshop with us to discuss firsthand accounts and ideas to improve the safety for pedestrians. This workshop will prove extremely useful in providing the much needed first hand accounts from the perspective of students that frequently access this area and what they feel is the area of most concern for pedestrian safety. Interpretive This week was a particularly formative one for us in the ream of scheduling and managing clear communication with community partners. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition kindly took the initiative to schedule short face-to-face meetings with members, and time slots were enthusiastically filled within several hours! It was fantastic to see how our partnership was really coming to life, and so gratifying to see that so many members saw a vested, active interest in improving pedestrian and cyclist access to the park. With a project of this scale, though, small conflicts and misunderstandings often occur, and we had the opportunity to communicate with the tend to a small one and resolve it as soon as it came about. As there was a mixup with the date of the SF Bicycle Coalition Meetings in the newsletter sent to members, we had to quickly consult with Janice in order to inform the members of the coalition who had signed up for the meetings that the scheduled day was Friday, February 21st rather than Thursday, February 27th (a day during which we had final presentations to complete for other classes and football practice). With the newfound information from Monday’s tour, we can really approach our project with a passive use of energy and resources in mind. Presenting a completely environmentally friendly pathway in conducting our project will prove of great importance when trying to see that our plan actually is implemented. We also learned from the Y2E2 tour that with new construction, comes cooperation from the people that will be using it. When working to implement new ideas and plans into a community we must not only look at what we want to accomplish, but what will benefit the community the most as well and find a happy medium. The feedback from our surveys that we’ve received thus far has allowed us to begin gleaming the variety of sentiments from different parties concerning pedestrian and cyclist access to Golden Gate Park. Receiving feedback from the SF Bike Coalition, the La Playa/Great Highway Neighborhood Watch, the Outer Sunset Merchant & Professional Association, the Java Beach Cafe, and the 45th Avenue Neighbors, as well as the students at Lawton Middle School will truly enable us to have a holistic vision of the various improvements needed for the park along Lincoln Way. Applicative As the quarter draws to a close, we’re thrilled to gear up for a strong and successful finish to our project. Our next few weeks will be the most intense and the most instrumental in accomplishing the project deliverables we laid out at the beginning of the quarter. That being said, we must retain a high level of focus and dedication if we hope to yield successful results. Furthermore, this is the most important time to synthesize everything we have learned in the classroom and in the field. As we make our final designs, we are methodically referencing the many facets of sustainable cities and service learning we have covered so that our project aligns with the objectives for each. It is especially critical that we continue to apply the important principles we have learned because our recommended designs could directly impact the living environment of the residents of Lincoln Way. As noted throughout the quarter, we feel responsible to uphold our commitment to both the SF Bike Coalition as well as the other community stakeholders involved in this project. Thus, we have devised a detailed timeline which will guide our work until the end of the quarter. After our noted scheduling conflicts last week due to poor weather conditions, we have rescheduled our interceptor surveys for this Sunday, February 16. We will spend the majority of the day in the area of Golden Gate Park abutting Lincoln Way, where we will systematically target parkgoers to gague transit patterns into the park. This will then help to inform us about our larger research question of general park accessibility. We will ask the following specific questions, with the hope of sparking a broader conversation: -How often do you visit Golden Gate Park? -By what means of transportation do you access the park? -From which part of San Francisco are you from? -What entrances do you typically take into the park? We will then focus in on the Lincoln Way entrances, asking respondents about their familiarity with and opinions about our study corridor. We believe this will give us a solid information base upon which to base our analysis of parkgoers’ transit patterns. That being said, we are keeping a few caveats in mind during these interviews. We are visitng the park during peak hours of a holiday weekend and therefore there may be a higher level of irregular visitors and car visits than usual. This may skew our data a bit to not be representative of typical parkgoers, however, we believe that increasing our sample size by surveying the largest number of parkgoers possible will help mitigate these concerns. We will be making our third trip to the city this Friday, February 21, and will be spending the day with Janice. The afternoon will be devoted to in-person interviews with members of the SF Bike Coalition who have volunteered to participate in our research. While this obviously represents a self-selecting, active body of the Bike Coalition who may be more eager about biking and alternative transit than other members, we are excitied for this great opportunity for face-to-face communication. Additionally, we hope to organize a workshop with a middle school in the Sunset District to gather information from a relatively untapped constituent base, that of the youth in the Sunset District. Assuming that youth frequently use the park, we believe they will provide valuable insight that can shape our recommended designs. This suite of trips represent the core of our community outreach and will be crucial in shaping the outcome of our project. As such, we are preparing extensively for each interview by completing background reading on the organization and compiling individualized questions. To round out our community outreach, we are still collecting our online survey responses and are waiting to hear back from correspondants such as Ben Grant of SPUR and Nicole Schneider of Walk SF, and will meet with Youth Commissioner Perksy next Saturday, February 22 at the Transit Summit. In sticking with our timeline, we will gather, code, and analyze our data during Weeks 7 and 8. Once this is complete, we plan to have our first draft of design recommendations available by the end of Week 8 so they can be reviewed by Janice and Nicole Schneider as per her generous recommendation. Our final design recommendations will be complete by the end of Week 9, at which point we will also have made a map of the Lincoln Way corridor to present to Supervisor Tang’s office. This will put us in good standing to prepare our final presentation and final report for the last week of the quarter. We are excited to tackle the heart of our project in the upcoming weeks and look forward to pulling the many parts of our work thus far together into a coherent and hopefully inspiring final report. |
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