Update on Project Activities
This week was one of the less intensive weeks of our quarter so far, as we did not take another trip down to Salinas. However, we have not let the project out of our working memory; we have been fleshing out our final survey draft and working out how to incorporate our potential GIS mapping technology without using a digital survey (we decided last week to use a physical handout as opposed to a Google form due to potential lack of residents’ cellular data). Jonathan suggested that we may be able to organize a conference call with current planning in order to add to our wealth of knowledge regarding the housing layout and zoning of the Alisal. However, as we all know, it is difficult to coordinate schedules, so we may not end up having this conversation. This is not a large issue at all, though, especially since we have so fortunately spoken to a wide variety of stakeholders, community members, and officials already. Today, two of our group members (and Emmanuel) took a trip to visit Professor Carol’s home in Carmel, where we enjoyed refreshments, a scenic tour of the residential area, and a home-cooked dinner. What We Observed and Learned Though we didn’t visit Salinas, our visit to Carmel shed a lot of light on our understanding of housing trends, historical segregation, and further motivated us about the significance of our work with the Alisal. In our residential tour of Carmel, Carol narrated comparisons and contrasts between her hometown and Salinas, as an expert of both regions. Both Carmel and Salinas feature very dense housing conditions with minimal, if any, space between units. However, the population density can not equate. As a beachy, wealthy, heavily- tourist destination, many of the homeowners purchase their beautiful properties, but leave it vacant for a majority of the year to live in their primary homes until the summer season. Homeowners have the privilege here to purchase 10 million dollar properties, tear them down, and rebuild them to be “quirky”, unique, and custom-designed. There is no underdevelopment, the small and windy roads are deemed “adorable”, houses are built around standing trees, parking is easy to find, the downtown area is packed with expensive retail stores and exclusively local restaurants- all clearly different characteristics that are or have ever been seen in Salinas. Why? As Carol articulates, “White people lived here on purpose.” Schools were made to segregate white children away from Italians and Mexicans. Schools were made to segregate white children away from minority residents that get pushed to marginalized locations, like the Alisal. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward It is not fair that some communities, such as Carmel, can live in such luxury while residents, in places like the Alisal, work to pack multiple families in rundown, substandard structures. With our understanding of the historical segregation that prompted this division, we have that much more passion and empathy moving forward with our work assessing the current housing conditions in Salinas. Everyone in our group is invested in our project and in supporting our community partners, which is definitely a huge, if not crucial, element to its success. We are grateful to be working with people like Carol and Jonathan who have clearly laid out why Salinas is a location worthy of attention, worthy of research, and worthy of community-based service. Moving into Week 7, we anticipate several busy meeting times, as we have to actually settle on a final survey, training module, and funding analysis, but this is work that we are ready and able to see to fruition. Update on Project Activities
We met on Sunday after our trip to San Francisco to debrief our experience. we were able to take an hour to kind of hash out next steps based on the information we collected during our SF trip. We realized that we needed to be more specific in our project and that the SFMTA really believes LTS is the primary metric they should use when evaluating bikeability in San Francisco. This team meeting was important because we are now narrowing down our focus for our scope of work. We ended up proposing to investigate how intersections in a supervisor district in SF have different bikeability ratings.We also ended up calling Janice on Friday for our check-in. During the meeting, we were able to figure out specific streets in District 6 that had great intersections and streets with poor intersections. Janice also suggested that we provide the SF Bicycle Coalition with a document describing Level of Traffic Stress (LTS) and the areas that LTS fails to address. She suggested that we could use data and information found in other bike ability metric studies to supplement our report on the weaker areas of LTS. This report would be helpful in holding SFMTA accountable for their use of LTS to evaluate bike safety and prompt them to consider other factors when doing so. We also met with David from the Stanford Geospatial Center on Friday. During this time, David showed us some good sources for GIS data online and suggested that we use Carto for displaying an interactive map that our community partner can use/share with the public. What We Observed and Learned The most important thing we learned and observed was that sometimes, community partners change plans and we have to be flexible and do it quickly to adjust to those changes effectively. We realize that at this point, we really need to start getting going on project components as we have been moving slowly along our project. Now that we have some clear deliverables, we can divide up the work accordingly and get things done quicker. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward The main priority for us is to assign which team members will research which pitfalls of LTS and put the information into our final document. This will be important as we enter the final stages of the quarter. Another thing we need to do is to really pick up our pace and perhaps have more frequent communications as we try to get more robust research and start putting the pieces together. Some of us will start to cobble together a base dataset with all pertinent street and intersection information for our GIS map. Then, we will be able to add other features to our dataset and equip our map with interactive features. Update on Project Activities
Two events dominated this past week - the Scope of Work presentation and our trip to San Francisco on Friday. We now better understand how the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) operate and what their needs are. At the same time, we have new questions about how to include equity, how to reach out to locals, and what format the map should be in. We will meet this Sunday to discuss additional research and field work needs. Later this week, we will also email Janice with the data we want from the SFMTA, call her with updates, and potentially meet with the Geospatial Center staff to discuss the map. What We Observed and Learned Overall, the consensus on our Scope of Work was to consider San Francisco’s diversity and unique context. For instance, language barriers might prevent Cantonese and Spanish speakers from engaging with bicycle projects and advocacy. Moreover, existing lifestyles are not always conducive to bicycling. Deland’s project on Broadway Street revealed that bicycling is a low priority for Chinatown residents. How can we account for these established preferences? Moreover, San Francisco is diverse socioeconomically. SFBC advocacy member Charles explained the need to tweak messaging when speaking to luxury condo owners versus single-room occupancy residents. This raises a crucial question: are bike, pedestrian, and transit resources being fairly distributed across the City’s cultural and socioeconomic groups? Low stress bicycling… for whom? Beyond equity, we must consider other non-infrastructure concerns, such as the hilly topography and windy weather. Additional suggestions included the using the Census Bureau’s “OnTheMap” service for traffic data, examining the purpose of bikeability metrics, and changing the metric’s name to be more intuitive or striking. Janice echoed the need to consider a range of issues in her email, commenting that we could consider adding land use, demographics, and danger hotspots to the Level of Traffic Stress (LTS) metric. An important element of our trip was experiencing San Francisco bicycling firsthand. A number of highlights stood out during our bike tour with Janice, as well as our trips to and from the Caltrain station. For instance, pavement quality along Townsend Street was a surprisingly important issue. The reason for the poor pavement was that Townsend is an “unaccepted street”, so the City leaves maintenance to nearby property owners. We also passed through San Francisco’s latest protected intersection, which was a joy to ride. However, because many other parts of our journey were exposed to traffic, the overall trip was stressful. This emphasizes the point that a bicycle trip is only as comfortable as its most stressful link, as well as the need for an extensive and well-connected network. During our trip with Janice, we encountered windy conditions and steep hills, both of which are elements of bikeability we should consider. Finally, the way back to the Caltrain station was quite scary. We took a route under the freeway, where there were no bike lanes at all for a long stretch. This highlights the need for wayfinding that can direct people to areas with better infrastructure. In our meetings with the SFBC and the SFMTA, we gained critical knowledge about how the two groups work. One of the SFBC advocacy team’s main functions is to keep track of infrastructure projects across the City. This need could shape how we create our map and our report. The second major function is to engage with members. In fact, most of Charles' activities that day involved meeting over coffee with Coalition members, spreading awareness about projects and asking them to participate in advocacy. Meanwhile, the SFMTA's main role as the handlers of transportation infrastructure money is to prioritize projects based on limited funding and to implement an overall strategy. This means that their decision-making tools are highly advanced, using both quantitative metrics like LTS, the high injury network, and connectivity as well as public input from meetings. We found out that LTS is in fact just one small part of the range of tools they use. In fact, Jamie called it "a blunt tool". Critical Analysis/Moving Forward This week, we gained valuable insights into bicycle advocacy and infrastructure from our trip, readings, and feedback. Firstly, we found there are a variety of barriers to improving bikeability, often because the intentions of policies and laws differ from implementation. For example, CEQA was intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in San Francisco was used to block all new bicycle infrastructure in the City for four years. This could, however, indicate a need for better preparation and accountability on the part of bike advocates and planners and the need to ensure people informed about the project beforehand. This is an important part of advocacy work. Additionally, we found that San Francisco’s Open Data policy does not actually mean all data is available. Most of the SFMTA’s data is actually not accessible, and making that data available would take time and effort that the Agency does not necessarily have. The lack of open and useable data on bicycling could impact citizens’ and government’s ability to analyze progress. Finally, just because San Francisco has a resolution to reach a 20% bicycle mode share by 2020 does not mean there is enough funding to achieve that. In fact, the 2013-2018 Bicycle Strategy acknowledges a significant funding gap in achieving 20% mode share. Additionally, we learned that city governance is a messy and not always transparent process, and much of it involves mediating the relationship between citizens and government. From the SFMTA meeting, Jamie Parks told us that gathering feedback from citizens is difficult, and that efforts to create public online forums have devolved into bickering. Mr. Parks argued that meeting face-to-face with people at public meetings is usually the best way to obtain feedback. On the flip side, disseminating government information to citizens is not easy. In addition to the barriers to maintaining open data, many of the SFMTA’s decision-making processes were unknown to us before we actually met with them. Though the Agency has an elaborate, computerized process for narrowing down future projects based on LTS, high injury networks, corridor studies, cost, connectivity, and demand, we did not know about this until the meeting. Nonprofit work is also about relationships - and it often means sitting in the complicated zone between citizens and government. The advocacy team’s two main roles - spreading awareness of bike projects and mobilizing the public to push for better projects - are related to the back and forth between these two groups. Being in this zone can lead to tension. Prior to our visit, the SFBC was engaging in a Twitter war with @SF311, a government agency, for blocking a bike path despite the protests of a person trying to bike through. The SFMTA was mistakenly tagged in this heated argument, angering some planners in the Agency. The SFBC is in a unique position for a nonprofit because it on good terms with the City government. The Coalition maneuver deftly in order to balance the demands of members and their relationship with the City. After the Twitter argument calmed down, they issued a quiet tweet apologizing to the SFMTA. Equity considerations were another important theme. How does bikeability fit into broader issues of gentrification, homelessness, equity? Charles and Julia of the SFBC consider their work to be part of much broader and interrelated issues of local governance, equity, and public space. However, there are sometimes conflicts. For example, homeless encampments block bike lanes at the Hairball, leading to a sensitive situation that the SFBC is unwilling to step into. What does this issue reveal about the broader complications with bicycle advocacy? The feedback we obtained will inform our project going forward. In terms of researching bikeability metrics, we now know that we will not necessarily replace LTS. If we decide not to replace it, we should at least suggest additions or tweaks to it, which can include equity and diversity, non-infrastructure concerns, hotspot and intersection analysis, local participation, and the high injury network. Moreover, now we better understand how the SFBC works, so we could potentially mold our work to better fit that. For example, they might use LTS to keep the SFMTA accountable. Right now, they usually use the high injury network to identify priorities. Creating a map that lets them track project progress and summarize past changes could be helpful, especially if it is layered with demographics, injury, land use, and participation tools. We also better understand our position relative to understanding hotspots and intersection safety, as well as researching equity concerns and find better ways for engaging with the public. Update on Project Activities
We met with our project partners, Adina and Chris, again this week to finalize the survey and handout, and start planning logistics for implementation. The meeting started by going over the project documents and equity reviews that Chris pointed us towards last week, as well as some extra research that members of the team conducted as well. We highlighted key points of the lit review we conducted, discussing how those points could inform our own project. We also started discussing distribution of the survey and information. We decided that having multiple methods of delivering the survey and relevant information was important to ensuring it was as accessible as possible. One of the projects we are considering taking on is making a short informational video to accompany a handout. We also discussed how to physically implement the survey, going over how to confirm connections with business organizations, and determining the actual process of asking people to conduct the survey. To establish field days, we are waiting on a couple of organizations and coalitions in the area and working out how to approach people and the mannerisms we should adopt. Since the meeting, over the course of the week we have finalized the survey— expanding it to about 30 questions that cover a broad scope of objective and opinion-based questions— and finished the handout— converting it to the tri-fold brochure featuring more visuals and graphics to make the survey and project more accessible. What We Observed and Learned From the 2014 LA Express Lane Survey, we learned that the project to institute tolled lanes was relatively successful and met most of its initial goals, although a long term assessment was lacking. Interestingly enough, the project was more successful on I-10 than on I-110, pointing to the possibility of different transit corridors having different purposes and thus different best strategies— one suspected cause was the quality of rideshare and bus programs on the different highways. There was not a noticeable time difference between the commute time of cars or public transit. Public transit ridership did increase by 27%, and after instituting tolling another 15%. Only ⅓ of the new drivers on the highways were in single occupancy vehicles. 40% of drivers agreed that tolling improved driving. Overall conclusions suggest that while the project improved public transit, it did not noticeably impact commute time, succeeding in some but not all of its goals. The project earned 24 million dollars, though it is unclear how much of that money then went into improving transit services. Similarly, it is also unclear of how many people used the discounted fastrak program for low income commuters, both questions that need further study to inform our own project. We also discussed the 2010 Equity Assessment conducted for the same project, which gave us an idea of the kinds of frameworks we might be able to use to discuss the results of our own survey. The 2010 Assessment divided equity into 3 dimensions— individual equity, group equity, and geographic equity— and 3 subcategories under each dimension— market, opportunity, and outcome. We plan on examining the assessment more as we more into the data analysis portion of our project to give us ideas on how to frame survey results. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Moving forward, the bulk of of our project will be to conduct the finalized survey, in order to determine the best practices for approaching our target audience of low-income working commuters. Throughout the next two to three weeks, we will focus on surveying along El Camino Real over the weekend and the Stanford campus over the weekdays when possible. We hope to establish connections with local businesses and community organizations, so as to truly grasp their employees’/ members’ perspective on the current traffic conditions along Highway 101 as well as their individual transportation needs. Logistically, we plan to schedule field days on which we, in groups of 2, will strategically visit businesses. As we desire to be considerate of our target audience’s schedule and workload, we plan to only visit businesses during their off peak hours and to offer a variety of options with which people can take the survey, especially if they’re interested in doing so, but busy at the moment. For example, between a link to an online survey, a pile of paper surveys, or an in-person survey, we will investigate which option is the most effective in number of responses as well as which option is the most effective in the comfort of the survey participant. Other considerations that we have considered in order to make the survey as accessible to people as possible, include: making a video for people to view as the topic of expressways may be unfamiliar territory for some, translating survey materials into other languages, and creating a tactile model for surveyors to explain the topic of expressways in person. By the end of our survey period we hope to ascertain which method achieves the greatest number of responses, taking into account that the method itself must be replicable by our community partners. Update on Project Activities
This week we pulled our resources together to design the initial survey draft. We also took a drive down to Salinas to meet with other stakeholders including: The Mayor Deputy City Manager CHISPA CEO Building Healthy Communities Director GIS experts They provided unique perspectives/insights to the city of Salinas and further enriched our understanding of the socioeconomic and demographic paradigm in the city. With the input we have received so far, we are confident in moving forward with the second version of the survey and the database platform; they gave us a better idea of what to include and how to incorporate it. We are also excited to receive more data from the GIS department showcasing ownership of homes, bedrooms and sizes of houses, which he said he could provide. This information coupled with the data that we collect will provided for an in depth multilayered GIS enabled database that will be critical in the analysis leading to grant applications. We will also be visiting Prof. Carol this coming weekend to further discuss the history of Salinas and continue to stay on the same page through every step of the project’s progression. What We Learned and Observed Today (February 10) we visited the Alisal and city council house to speak with the Mayor of Salinas, Building Healthy Communities, CHISPA housing management, and a GIS data collection expert. Our meeting with the mayor was an overall enjoyable and enriching day trip. Mayor Joe Gunter was lively and candid, clearly bewilderment on and proud to have been elected mayor of the city in November 2012. Given that Salinas is mostly composed of Hispanic residents, the mayor conveyed that he understood the implications of being a white male representative over his jurisdiction. Mayor Gunter cited low voter turnout as the reason behind his seat. With Mayor Gunter and the assistant city manager, we learned more about the hierarchy of city council (the mayor acts like a chairman over the city, while the city manager acts as the CEO) and we learned about the bi-monthly public city council meetings where residents voice their opinions and concerns, and how crucial yet restrictive an agenda is in terms of facilitating the city council meetings that leaves predetermined, strict time slots for each topic. Our meeting the GIS expert instilled confidence in our current trajectories and gave us more data options to work with. We noticed that the Building Healthy Communities representative was reluctant and almost skeptical of our positions there, as outsider Stanford students attempting to make change in a city that wasn't ours. However, she was open to helping us develop a survey that would be simple, useful, and non-abrasive. We originally planned on presenting our survey through Google Forms, with the assumption that most people have access to have smartphones. Though the Building Healthy Communities representative confirmed that most do have access, she illuminated that they may have limited data coverage- an additional cost we did not anticipate. With this information, we collaboratively decided that a print-out version of the survey would be most effective. Finally, we took a tour of the Alisal. We saw major overcrowding-- small houses directly behind small houses right next to small houses, all occupying one block without rest. Front lawns were cluttered in some spaces, and in others front lawns were kept meticulously neat. Sometimes, we would see small trailer park patches on the periphery of house clutters, adding to the crowd. There were playgrounds interspersed for children, and we passed a couple of small parks. Those small lots were, for the most part, the only green places the residents could enjoy. From our tour, we learned that we may need to have a more specific metric for exterior evidence of housing conditions. In mentally “rating” each home, as residents would have to for the survey, it was apparent that the lines between good, fair, poor, and substandard can be very ambiguous. The people we met with also helped us brainstorm that cars, parking spots, and converted garages are strong indicators of overcrowding- a variable we weren’t sure how to quanitify. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward From our meetings with CHISPA and Building Healthy Communities, we realized that resident input is important for our project to be valuable in the long term for the city. They discussed a previous program by the Visiting Nurses Home Association to collect health data from the residents that required six months of public discussion, but in the end, it was incredibly successful because it was community-led and community-based. Especially in our current political climate, in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, many residents may be suspicious of people walking around their neighborhood and conducting a survey. We need to ensure that we have community buy-in for us to be able to accurately gauge the housing conditions of the Alisal. Our next steps are editing our survey to take into the input we got today (including more measures of overcrowding for example) and building a training module for the residents. We will also be sending our survey to Building Healthy Communities and CHISPA to get feedback from them on what we can improve and discussing what features should be in our training module. The GIS team will additionally send us demographic data about the city that they already have so we can figure out what has been recorded previously and does not need to be in our survey. Our next steps include finalizing our survey and drafting a training module that includes how to respond to passerby that may question the purpose of our survey. It is very helpful that we now have a wealth of more contacts to receive advice from; this project is truly becoming a community initiative. |
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