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
Continuing on with our research from last week, one of our main focuses this week was to further solidify our base knowledge on the mitigation of traffic congestion. The readings Adina and Chris, our community partners with Friends of CalTrain and TransForm respectively, have sent us to give context on our project included a mix of qualitative and quantitative studies on the socioeconomic character of managed lanes. For example, we read and summarized a guide to the Bay Area Express Lanes projects as well as a guide to the Bay Area Express Lanes projects, a California Department of Transportation’s report on induced demand. Our literature review will be increasingly useful as we begin work on the centerpiece of our project, a survey on the conditions of Highway 101 that will be targeted at low-income commuters. Regarding the survey, this week we were able to meet with both Chris and Adina. There, we learned of the motivation behind the survey, which is to influence the direction of Highway 101 traffic congestion mitigation efforts to address the needs of low income communities; the survey is meant to illuminate just what those needs are. During the meeting, we discussed several topics with the main takeaways being the regressive nature of HOTs, the current strategy that the County of San Mateo is considering— a HOT3+—, and Friends of Caltrain’s preferred method of implementation— using the money from the toll to finance alternative and accessible transit. After learning and determining the motivation for Friends of CalTrain and TransForm’s survey, we honed in on what our team will be contributing towards its completion during these next 7 weeks. Our team eventually came to mutual agreement with Adina and Chris that our final deliverable will be a pilot study that will investigate the best methods for understanding the views of low-income Highway 101 commuters. Through the pilot study, we, alongside our community partners, will work collaboratively to give our community partners an expedited survey process as well as a scaleable survey; we hope that our work will be useful in setting the framework for the deployment of a wide-scale survey project which Friends of CalTrain and TransForm hope to initiate some time this spring. In terms of deciding which demographic will be surveyed, after posing the question of whether we should do a comparative study of perspectives between higher income and lower income folks, as Adina and Chris’ request, we will do a deep dive on outreaching to lower income folks to work out any survey kinks before Friends of Caltrain and TransForm scale up the survey after our pilot. We then discussed some of the logistics of surveying, including which locations to survey to ensure that we’re getting a representative sample of working class people, finding incentives for people to take the survey, and where to initially pilot the survey (here at Stanford). What was a priority and what continues to be high priority is formulating a clear, concise, and empathetic survey to administer to folks. This week, we made initial comments on the survey draft and information handout that Friends of Caltrain and TransForm are developing and presented some of those concerns and comments to Chris during our first meeting. We also went over the accompanying survey handout, and offered some suggestions for improvements there as well. What We Observed and Learned During the meeting, an enlightening insight that Adina brought up during our first meeting was that higher income folks are more likely to benefit from transit benefits from their employer. Through discussion, we came to a consensus that one motivator of doing this survey is to promote equity in these types of projects, but this pillar of sustainability also informs the environmental sustainability pillar. Some past studies indicate support across income levels for express lanes (pay to drive). This is a counterintuitive finding as we expected equity to be a high concern for lower-income individuals. Another surprising finding was the lack of concern regarding equity on the part of CCAG. Adina told us about how previous equity assessments from CCAG, especially the assessment created for their long term transportation plan, were superficial at best, featuring very little meaningful analysis on how projects would actually impact low income communities. In CCAG’s equity assessments, if a project occurred in a low income community, it was assumed to benefit that community, even for works like widening highways. This lack of attention given to low income communities by government agencies was honestly staggering, and points to a dire need in society for more thoughtful analysis. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward After understanding where Friends of Caltrain and TransForm are heading with this specific project, it will be of utmost importance to situate ourselves appropriately within their vision and within their process of trying to influence express lanes program developers to include “equity” as a metric they are measuring their programs around. To recommend alternatives to program development that do not have a lens on equity, we will be doing a research sprint on LA ExpressLanes project development. Therefore when Friends of Caltrain and TransForm take the survey results and analysis later in the year to program developers, they will be able to draw on previous program experiences and effectively recommend equitable pathways to the express lanes program. Our conversation also underscored how underserved low income communities have been in the past, especially with regards to transportation. CCAG’s “equity assessment” shows us that government agencies do not always have the will or capacity to conduct meaningful analysis about equity concerns— it is our job to fill that gap. The project we help create for Friends of Caltrain and TransForm should be empathetic and relevant to the lived experience of the low income commuters of San Mateo County. Without a genuine desire to engage with and understand the experiences of those we are surveying, our assessment will be as surface level as CCAG’s. This week we will be beginning the next stage of the pilot survey process. We have started editing the survey draft, therefore it is time to begin connecting with workers in the study area: businesses in San Mateo County. In implementing the pilot, our team was thinking about initially prototyping the survey to workers here at Stanford for two reasons: they are the demographic that we are aiming to hear from, and it is much easier for us students to get in contact with the worker network here at Stanford than with the networks off-campus. However, because Stanford may give transit benefits already, this sample may be slightly skewed and not representative of the larger population in San Mateo County. In thinking about survey processes and survey takers, we will test a variety of approaches to maximize survey responses. Some strategies will be more successful than others, but as starting points we’ll be visiting restaurants and other likely commuter-dependent workplaces in downtown areas like Redwood City and testing survey questions on people on campus. This week our group focused on narrowing down the focus of our project and trying to map out how we will complete each of the project deliverables. We met as a group on Wednesday and we discussed where we will access the data we are going to analyze. Evan also reviewed some basic Excel graph features so that we can have a structured, clean format for all of our tables and figures.
Another purpose of our meeting on Wednesday was to try to identify the main purpose of our project in relation to the class coursework and discussion. While we are trying to specify the scope of our project, we want to ensure that it complements the ideas of sustainability that we have been learning about in class. For example, one benefit of our project is understanding how the Los Altos can better prepare for a future recession by understanding the main economic drivers and areas of economic improvement within the city. The Los Altos Economic Development Project is a bit different than the other class projects, such as the Tenderloin project and the Friends of Caltrain project. Our work has been strictly off-site, and we lack many of the intimate conversations and primary resources that other groups might have. However, we also realized that since we are analyzing the data without any previous trips to the city, we are helping ensure that the ideas in the Economic Big Book will be based on objective, non-biased analysis. But we also collectively agreed that incorporating first-hand testimonies does have its benefits and can certainly strengthen and ‘humanize’ our project, so we decided to bring this up at our meeting. We then later met with Jennifer for our weekly meeting; we made sure that we identified exactly what our role would be for this project in regards to the City of Los Altos. In order to better prepare for the midterm presentation on Wednesday, we went over specific duties that each of us had. After voicing our concern regarding incorporating conversations and interviews to our project, Jennifer provided us with potential contacts that we could interview in order to provide different perspectives and insight on the City of Los Altos’ economic status: the President of the Chamber of Commerce and the Director of Los Altos Village Association. We plan on participating in coffee chats with them over this weekend and learning valuable concepts, which we will incorporate into our deliverable. Adding new inside perspectives will be highly valuable in helping us develop a project that will be beneficial to both our learning and the economic resilience of Los Altos. This realization allowed us to look at our data with a fresh perspective; because of this, we are able to humanize the data and look beyond the numbers. With this new sense of understanding, we are able to truly comprehend what the numbers that we’re working with mean. Afterwards, we spent time reflecting on the project objectives, and with our renewed sense of how we’re going to progress with this project, we ended the meeting with an agreement to regroup over the weekend after analyzing more data sets on our own. One of the largest take-aways from this meeting was the importance of understanding how analyzing this data would help the city of Los Altos and how our work would help the city move forward. We agreed that understanding the big picture helps motivate us and helps us understand how to take the next steps. We identified some main questions that we’d like to help answer with the data that we’ll be analyzing, including: what does having higher income mean? Does it necessarily mean lower crime rates? Is diversity impacted? Are better school systems an automatic result of communities with higher incomes? Next week, we plan to actively focus on answering these questions. We also plan on potentially attending a city hall meeting in Los Altos in addition to reaching out to community members and conducting chats and interviews. Update on Project Activities
Firstly, we’d like to say a mournful goodbye to Amabel, but also commend her on her bravery to take care of herself and not stretch herself too thin. In happier news, however, we’d also like to give a warm welcome to the newest member of our team: Paul! We all had an exciting chance to get to know each other on our first excursion together to the Tenderloin this afternoon. In the Tenderloin (TL), we met with community leaders in a small group setting. The four of us first met with five community leaders, all Tenderloin residents, who work with the TNDC. The group was racially diverse: three African Americans, one Hispanic, and one Caucasian, who have lived in the TL for different amounts of time. Some live in single room occupancy housing (SROs) and some live in affordable housing units run by the TNDC. Each of these community leaders have had significant struggles in their life but were able to recover from those challenges and are doing all they can to give back to the community. After our meeting with the community leaders, we went to a community meeting with a developer. All community members were welcome to come and ask questions about the proposed building. About ten community members came to the meeting and five or six asked questions or expressed concerns. The community members in attendance were racially diverse--Caucasian, Asian, and African American, and it seemed like people of all of the represented ethnic backgrounds were able to express their thoughts. What We Observed and Learned In our first meeting, we were introduced to 5 community leaders within the Tenderloin: Jesse and Sherry, members of the Tenderloin People’s Congress, Don and Steve, Tenderloin Food Justice Leaders, and Darrell, an organizer for a community homeless coalition. After hearing a little from each of these leaders about their lives and how they came to the Tenderloin, we provided more pointed questions about their experiences with services and retail within the TL. When asked about which services were available in the neighborhood and which services were only available outside it became clear that the TL was lacking in many services that went beyond the realm of healthful food access. Some of the services listed were laundry, cleaners, notaries, women specific services, and office supplies. Yet despite the range of lacking services, when asked what kind of service/retail would be most beneficial to the TL, the resounding answer was stores selling healthy, affordable food. It is clear that the proliferation of corner stores in the TL not only exacerbates issues surrounding poor nutrition and associated health problems. For some residents, it’s possible to take public transportation to the nearest supermarket; however, for a community in which many people are elderly and/or disabled it is difficult, if not impossible, for them to reach those same supermarkets. During the community development meeting, a construction company presented on and answered questions about 1 of the 14 new proposed developments occurring in the Tenderloin area. This confirmed project would be a conversion of the existing parking lot on the 400 block of Eddy street into a residential unit. The new one story building would host 24 units on a 700 square ft plot land and include 9 stalls of parking. The limited parking spaces are an effort by the developer to appeal to residents with no cars and thereby increase public transportation usage. The building would be in accordance with San Francisco’s 12% inclusion ordinance, with low-income defined as a total income of ninety thousands dollars a year per unit of two individuals. Concerns brought up by the attendees of the meeting revolved around the impact the building would have on the outside community and the need for a community space. Comments were made how the building might interfere with sunlight entering residential units where the walls run parallel to the neighboring buildings; the representative responded to those concerns with assurance that a light well would be installed. The community members had a lot of logistical questions that the representative redirected to people he has been working including Claire, Lorenzo, and Dan. Lorenzo stressed that the community desperately needed a communal space for events and meetings, expressing frustration with the current state of existing communal spaces being limited and often times used for storage. Overall the meeting was pretty tense, but most community members left seeming to feel resigned but not angry. Critical Analysis / Moving Forward It was an extremely important step for us to visit and actually connect with community members and leaders in the neighborhood after the conceptual research work that we’ve been pouring our time into until this point. The community leaders were full of energy and offered us an abundance of information stemming from their personal backgrounds and lived experiences in this neighborhood both as residents and community activist leaders. Our notes from the meeting are still fairly messy since we just met this afternoon, but we will have them organized for our post next week. One of the largest take-aways from these meetings, however, were identifying two specific areas of need within the community and thus potential recommendations for newly developed retail space: the need to address food justice issues and the need for more community space. Throughout our meeting with the community leaders, we kept coming back to the lack of a large grocery store and the plethora of liquor/candy stores in the area. Groceries at corner stores are significantly more expensive than groceries at larger grocery stores, but since many Tenderloin residents often have limited funds and disabilities, they can’t afford to travel to larger grocery stores and stock up. The space where the developer meeting was held is currently the only real “community space” and it was a particularly small, poorly-lit space that appeared mostly to be used for storage. Next week we plan to attend the food justice coalition meeting with the TNDC and some of the community leaders we met with this Friday. We also got the phone numbers for Sherry, with the Tenderloin People’s Congress, and Steve, a food justice leader with the TNDC and will be following up with specific community needs around retail development. In the meantime, we have reached out to our community partners Lorenzo and Ryan about survey data that will be of use to us in our continued research and analysis of the needs and opportunities around community-serving commercial businesses in the TL; when we first met with Lorenzo and Ryan, they encouraged us to focus mostly on pre-existing surveys and data because there have already been a myriad conducted and in these cases, not having to reinvent the wheel is of much benefit both to this project and to the community. Once we have this data, we will then also be better equipped to delve deeper into renewed first-hand research and overall analysis. Update on Project Activities
We’ve set up a meeting with Tony for next Thursday morning from 9-10 at Kaffeehaus in San Mateo. We hope to have a Project Scope of Work draft by then to ensure that our project is useful to our community partner and to receive specific feedback of ways the community partner can support our project. This weekend we plan to digitize the survey and turn it to a Google form. Next week, we will copy current survey data onto the google form, including translating Spanish surveys into English. We are hoping to go into San Mateo the first week of February to begin surveying small businesses. By that time, we will have a shortened version of the survey that we can use for businesses that refused to do the old survey. Throughout the process, we will also be conducting a literature study to identify other reports that have investigated small business displacement. We would like to find studies that have tracked small business displacement as part of overall gentrification as well as those that have looked into various solutions to prevent small business displacement. What We Observed and Learned Tony emailed us a 2005 case study on Silver Spring, MD titled Minimizing Small Business Displacement in a Revitalization Zone, conducted by the Urban Studies and Planning Program at the University of Maryland. The study identifies the issues facing small business owners brought on by the County’s redevelopment effort. Many were struggling to adjust to the negative externalities of the revitalization effort, such as the disruption caused by construction activity, losing market share to the new businesses, rapidly increasing rent, and insufficient exchange of information both among local businesses and between the businesses and the county government. Many of these issues are extremely pertinent to the situation currently unfolding in the B Street Corridor in downtown San Mateo. But rather than a county-funded revitalization effort like that of Silver Spring, San Mateo’s business displacement is being driven by the Bay Area’s transformation into an affluent region centered around the tech-industry. Many of the small, ethnic businesses in the B Street Corridor will either choose to relocate due to lack of clientele and lower profit margin, or be forced to leave because of failure to adjust to the new market. Nonetheless, the Silver Spring case study asserts that small ethnic businesses provide affordable goods and services unavailable at larger retailers, as well as aspects of diversity and stability to the local economy, proving that loss of these businesses is more than just a sentimental issue. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward The Silver Spring cast study cited poor exchange of information as a critical issue regarding small business displacement. Many owners didn’t take advantage of county assistance programs either because they were unaware or they believed that the programs were inaccessible to them. Others lamented about the excessive paperwork required by the programs, and claimed the process took too long to justify the work needed to see benefits. It is for this reason we are significantly shortening the length of the survey and converting it into an online Google Form. We also plan to meet face to face with owners to reaffirm the survey’s intent in tracking gentrification to minimize the negative impacts these small ethnic businesses are seeing. |
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