Update on Project Activities
We, along with all other groups in the class, created our first deliverable last week! We finalized our Scope of Work and created a presentation to showcase our ideas to the class. As per the schedule that we’ve set up in our SoW, this week was our first week of data collection in which we’ve each budgeted time to make 20 calls to former clients. Some challenges have already arisen as we each are trying to make time within our own busy schedules to make these calls. Additionally, we expect that this project will necessitate a calling strategy that involves the following criteria:
Since the next three weeks of our project is pretty straight forward in terms of deliverables and expectations, we have had limited communication with Jason. The extent of our contact has been an exchange of a view interesting articles. What We Observed/Learned Jazlyn was able to attend the housing event that was put on by CLS-EPA in conjunction with various partners on campus. It was interesting to hear the panelists, but the most intriguing and important part of the panel was the dynamic of the room. There were a large number of people who had been bused in to Stanford for the event, including high school children. When the Q&A section started, there was a distinct separation between the type of questions. On the one hand, there were the Stanford types who had intellectual curiosities, questions about policy and history. On the other, there were somewhat hostile questions from citizens of East Palo Alto, who were demanding support and change from those on the panel. As someone in the audience, I was brought back into the thoughts of where our place is with regards to service in EPA. No matter how humble we are, at the end of the day, they have to live with the problems that we are trying to fix. Most of the power and responsibility for this project is a bit out of our hands, yet we house all of the project’s risk. As a group, we’ve realized that if we don’t get enough survey responses, we’ll have limited data to work with. However, from what it seems, people are willing to talk to us if they’re called at the appropriate times. We also run the risk of having clients whose phone numbers are no longer functional or accurate. Critical Analysis Realistically speaking, our team may have underestimated the task of collecting the data. It is easy for us to slip into the mindset that the level of importance of our project to our group is equal to the level of public excitement to cooperate with their information. Our group members can see the potential for this project, but we are finding difficulty in coordinating the right times to contact people. In the grand scheme of things, our role in and to the community is miniscule. The value of the impact that this collection of data will make is based largely on the community that we wish to serve. However, the people in these very communities may not have the bandwidth necessary to be active participants. Their main priorities are based on general aspects of survival. The remaining time that they have is then dedicated to things other than answering our survey questions. The trouble that we are having contacting people will probably be beneficial to us for the duration of this project. The structure of our schedules do not lend themselves to time dedicated solely to telephone communication. Society has become so ingrained with efficient communication that can be done in tandem with other tasks, that we failed to see the major difference in the type and setting of communication that is necessary for this project. We now understand the need to better tailor our approach to data collection to be sensitive to the daily lifestyles of the former clients and re-evaluate our roles as people outside of the affected communities. 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. 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. I. Update on Project Activities This week our team worked with Victoria on the ongoing community outreach program for the Oakland Retrofit program. More specifically, we provided our input on the initial survey to be sent out by the City of Oakland to tenants, landowners, real estate professionals. This survey data would provide the critical demographic background that the city would need to make decisions on financial policy, especially the implementation of financial support and incentives. Generally speaking, we suggested that the survey ask participants to describe what policies and practices would be fair instead of asking what would be best for them individually, and explaining in more detail the city’s rationale for incentivizing certain areas or buildings over other areas or building types. If this survey data is made available to us, and occurs within the timeframe of our project, we hope to use this demographic data to create comprehensive ArcGIS maps that would allow the city of Oakland to visualize areas of potential focus. Also this week, we searched for preliminary data to input into a potential map of Oakland, which is described in further detail below. II: What We Learned We have begun to focus our attention on what will be a large part of our final deliverable: the survey. Working on the survey will help us define our scope of the project, because we will become familiar not only with how our project will impact residents, but also who those residents really are. We realized during a group meeting on Wednesday that it may not be realistic to find out specific data for each tenant, but we are confident that homeowner data will be available, and have begun preliminary searches for said data. In the coming week, we will reach out to Victoria and the Building and Housing Manager in hopes to find what we need. The best way to represent the data we acquire from the survey will be through a layered GIS map, one complete with – ideally – house-by-house socioeconomic information. After our exposure to the ArcGIS tool, we have decided to create a map visualizing the “vulnerability” of certain at-risk areas of Oakland. We will finalize in the coming week how to best create this metric of vulnerability with which we will assess the city. It is vital to first have the survey data before moving forward with any policy recommendations so that we may prioritize areas of current policy that need overhaul. These areas will most likely include things like finances, wherein the city ought to consider reworking the 70/30 cost split between the owners and tenants in order to better reflect the income levels of a given household; or community outreach in a language that is spoken in that home. III: Next Steps Moving forward, our team is looking forward to getting more involved with City of Oakland officials working on the project. Victoria is planning on putting us into contact with these officials, after which we plan on scheduling a Skype conference call to discuss our preliminary project scope and deliverables. Camilo has kindly created a decision tree of our project process which encompasses the scope, as well as a graphic listing deliverables at all project phases. Of particular importance for our team are the ArcGIS maps we plan on creating as well as an outreach pamphlet comprised of these maps, information about soft-story risk, and resources available to them (as tenants or landlords) presented in an easy-to-understand and digest format. We hope that our map will be able layer together soft-story building information, seismic shaking risk, regions of liquefaction, class/ethnic distribution by neighborhood and information collected from the survey being currently prepared (should the information be made available soon enough). If these layers prove to dense, we plan on brainstorming a specific metric encompassing these factor that can measure vulnerability (an inability to recover from soft-story collapse) that can be applied graphically. In order to figure this out we have set up a meeting with David Medeiros, Stanford’s geospatial instructor and reference specialist, for next week to talk through some of our initial ideas and determine what actually is feasible given our experience and time-frame. Further down the pipeline, our group plans on attending some community outreach meetings. Before that we plan on thinking of some questions to ask members of the community who attend; currently our only idea is for feedback on our vulnerability metric but more will surely pop up as we became more engaged with others who are working on the project and have unique perspectives and experiences. This week our work on the Friends of Caltrain project was focused on preparing for our first formal meeting with our community leaders. We met at Coupa Cafe with Adina Levin, Executive Director of Friends of Caltrain and Charisse Lebron, Director of Health Policy and Community Development for Working Partnerships USA. The primary purpose for our first meeting was for us to better understand the exact question and problems we would be tackling together over the course of the project. However, before jumping straight into this, Adina gave us some necessary background information on the current state of commuting and transit in the South Bay.
The county of Santa Clara has just recently approved a project that would bring Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to San Jose leading to an anticipated increase of transfers between transit operators in the area. However, Adina relayed her experiences talking with transit professionals, explaining that they often view commuters of different modes as different audiences, leading to a somewhat "separate but equal" mindset between transit options such as heavy rail and bus service. When linking this to available data on transit riders and their income levels, we began to focus our research question around the subject of equity issues in transit options across socioeconomic brackets. Are lower-income service workers being priced out of certain transit options? Do current scheduling practices present a barrier to transit for those who may hold multiple jobs? Questions such as these informed our discussion and brought us to our main focus. In 2016, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group will be presenting a ballot measure to the Santa Clara County which would propose a pilot program for fare integration across transit operators in the area. Our goal as a project team is to provide data and ultimately a hypothesis for recommendations as to how this fare integration pilot system might work. Adina and Charisse then broke this goal down into three different deliverables. First, they would like us to produce a literature review of existing fare integration schemes so we can see how other groups and governments tackled the same issues we are currently facing in the South Bay. Second, we will be responsible for creating and administering interviews and surveys of several commuter populations in Santa Clara County so that we can better understand the problems they face when choosing how to commute every day. With these two materials they then want us to provide possible recommendations to alleviate the difficulties faced by local commuters outlined in our research. Ultimately, what was most helpful for us was that Adina and Charisse really focused on how our project was a type of advocacy. In some cases, transit operators may put their own needs and priorities above the transit rider. Fears of revenue shortfalls and complicated cooperation have greatly slowed efforts to develop an integrated fare system, which has lead to many commuters' problems going unanswered. Our main purpose in this project is to find out what exactly these problems are, back them up with reputable data, and bring these to transit operators to show how they are failing to meet their goals in providing adequate transit service to all residents. This is an essential goal of our project that we must always keep in mind throughout the quarter to keep us on track. Looking forward, we've planned our next group meeting for Tuesday February 3rd where we will present a draft for the survey and interview questions. We ended our meeting with a brainstorming session to begin thinking about what subjects we want to address through these questions. We also identified our language strengths throughout the group as our data collection will most likely be from multilingual populations. (Marty and Connie noted their proficiencies in Spanish and Adina mentioned the possibility of us having a volunteer interpreter if needed.) Our next week will be spent putting together this information as well as compiling our Scope of Work. |
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