Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #463: A couple of reports on the Chick-fil-a-car-wash gathering space/driveway.

In this article I’m just reporting two things that were recently pointed out to me by my wife, who in turn was clued in by friends.  The issue is whether or not people are going to use the “gathering space” in front of the Chick-fil-a-car-wash as a driveway.  We have our initial evidence, thanks to a sharp-eyed colleague.

Recall Post #431, where I asked whether the Chick-fil-a-car-wash “gathering space” was a sham.  The idea is that the drive-through there literally cannot function unless some cars are allowed to drive across the brick patio in front of the store.  Briefly, unlike a normal drive-through, there’s no place to go if there’s a problem with your order, unless you can drive across that front patio to get back to a parking place.

Observation #1:  Look carefully at the little green car.  Off to the left.   Driving across the plaza.

Source:  Catherine Douglas Morgan, “Two Story Flagship Car Wash Now Open in the Town of Vienna”, Tyson’s Reported 11/18/2019, accessible at this link: https://www.tysonsreporter.com/2019/11/18/two-story-flagship-carwash-now-open-in-town-of-vienna/

OK, so that’s somewhat amusing.  Plausibly, that’s an old rendering, before the Town got them to agree to a “No Left Turn” sign at the exit to the drive-through.

Observation #2:  Less amusing, drivers have already figured out to use that plaza in the other direction when traffic is heavy.  A colleague reported that during a particularly bad back-up last week, on that section of Maple, she saw a driver who was heading toward Vienna drive down the McDonald’s access road, across the plaza, and exit onto Maple at the Chick-fil-a drive-through.  That put them about a dozen cars ahead of where they would have been, if they’d driven up the access road (toward Oakton) and exited onto Maple at the McDonald’s.

Northern Virginia, traffic backup, you can get a dozen cars ahead if you use that plaza as a driveway?  In hindsight, of course somebody’s going to do that.  I never would have guessed it ahead of time.  I’m not sure there’s a “No Entry” sign there.  But of course they are.

Commentary:  All it would take is a couple of large moveable objects, and Chick-fil-A could block vehicular access to that brick patio/gathering space.  They could prevent cars from using it, will still allowing their delivery truck to use it to drop off their freight.

My bet is, they aren’t going to do that.  For exactly the reason stated in Post #431.  Seems to me that they need to keep it open, to handle botched orders in the drive-through line.

In the grand scheme of things, this hardly matters.  That area is so close to the road that you’d have to be kind of desperate (or deaf) to try to use it as any sort of community “gathering space”.

But the fact that the “gathering space” is also going to be a driveway raises the idea that maybe the benefits of MAC have been a touch over-sold.  It’s hard for me to look at that structure and say what useful or beneficial things the citizens of Vienna got from that, that they would not have gotten from by-right construction under the existing commercial zoning.

 

Post #462: On mail-based surveys and other methods to gather public opinion

The proximate issue is Councilmember Patel’s proposal to have a short survey routinely included in the Vienna Voice, the Town’s monthly newsletter.  I judge that Town staff’s response to that proposal was not an even-handed discussion of the issues (Post #461).

In fact, I was so flabbergasted by Town staff’s response that I’m having a hard time figuring out what to write about it.  And not just because some of it was wrong on the facts.  (Or some of the straw-man assertions.  I thought “Is Council setting an expectation that all decisions will be made by referendum” was particularly over-the-line.)

What really astonished me is that virtually everything they said, to knock the idea of a newsletter-based survey, goes double and then some for every alternative that they suggested.

From the standpoint of statistics, more-or-less all the things that they thought were wrong about a newsletter-based survey are even more wrong about the alternatives they proposed.  And upon reflection, I think they genuinely don’t understand that.  There’s no reason they should.  They weren’t hired to be survey experts.

And I’m guessing they are trying so hard to quash this idea because they think it’s vastly inferior to various alternatives.  But it’s not.  And that’s what I’m going to concentrate on here.

As a means for:

  • determining what the average Vienna voter thinks,
  • in a way that is transparent, and
  • in a way that can be audited, where
  • the results are not the product of staff’s subjective interpretation of data,
  • using methods that we can afford …

It’s hard to beat a mail-based survey.  And the two large advantages of using the Vienna Voice for that are that we’ve already paid for the postage, and (probably) people will at least glance through it before they throw it out.

In case anyone cares, I have considerable bona fides in this area, having conducted surveys as a Federal employee and in other contexts.  Including, oddly enough, actually having used a newsletter to perform what was, and may still be, the largest-ever survey of Medicare beneficiaries’ difficulties in finding a primary care physician.

Continue reading Post #462: On mail-based surveys and other methods to gather public opinion

Post #461: Patel proposal to survey Town residents: I’ll let the staff response speak for itself.

There’s a Town Council work session tonight.  On the agenda is an idea from Councilwoman Patel.  The idea is that the Town might routinely include a brief survey in the Vienna Voice monthly newsletter.

This would be a way for the Town to gauge where the average citizen stood on the issues of the day.

The unsigned, un-attributed Town staff response is quite a piece of work.

Maybe my take on this is just my own bias, as I have done surveys as part of my job.  But I think not.  So I’ll ask you just to read the rest of this, and see if you can get a sense for whether this is a fair and even-handed discussion of this proposal.  Assess how much it strives to present an accurate assessment of the pros and cons of this approach.  (Hint:  See if you can find any pros.)

I’m not going to comment other than to make a single technical point.  Mailing a survey to 100% of residents is, by definition, a random-sample survey.  It’s just that the sample rate is 100%.

Here it is, in its entirety.  Literally cut-and-paste.  Here’s the Town staff response, to the idea of asking you what you think, on a routine basis, as part of the Vienna Voice mailing.  You can find it in its original format on this Town of Vienna page.

Councilmembers Want to Know… survey initiative
Staff questions/concerns
• Unlike the National Citizen Survey, which uses random sampling, this type of survey is not statistically valid. (However, over time, data from survey may be quoted/used as if it is statistically valid – people tend to forget that part.)

• Crafting survey questions is a science. It’s very easy to accidentally inject bias into the question or to shape the question to generate the response desired.

• Is Council setting an expectation that all decisions will be made by referendum?

• Issues and decisions that must be made are often complex. Despite educational efforts, some residents will not be aware of all of the intertwined considerations that factor into decision-making.

• The timeline of utilizing the newsletter for monthly surveys is awkward, and data may not be available in timely enough matter to impact some Council decisions. Newsletter deadline is the 10th of the month preceding publication.

Example of how process might work:
o Councilmember questions due to editor December 10.
o Survey published in January newsletter around January 1.
o Deadline for responses? If January 10, could publish results in February issue; if later than that, would have to be in March issue.

• Who will “vet” questions posed? Editor, individual Councilmember, all of Council?

• Who will be responsible for analyzing and reporting data?

• Sets up unrealistic expectations? What if Council chooses to go in a direction that is different from survey results?

• Limited response, especially as time goes on.

• Will survey responses be anonymous or identified? No way to know that hearing from a representative set of voices.

• How will surveys be returned to the Town? Will people make the effort to drop off or mail to Town Hall?

Engagement best practices – “Meeting People Where They Are,” Sept. 1, 2019 ICMA article
• Conducting outreach and surveying using only one communications channel almost guarantees biased results.

• Need to use all outreach methods at our disposal, traditional and virtual, to provide more residents an opportunity to engage.

• Need to meet residents where they are. E.g., pop-up opportunities at events where people can respond to a survey on their phones or provided iPads; outreach at community events.

• Keeping the barrier to participation low means being able to instantly engage: no usernames or passwords, no creating an account.

• Being mobile-minded is one of the best ways to increase engagement.

• Messaging is best when it shows the value that public input will have on the decision-making process. For example: “Your input will help set priorities for our 2040 Transportation Plan.

• While a boots on the ground approach does build relationships, it’s difficult to scale, especially given time and staff constraints.

• The best way to optimize engagement and increase equity is to combine traditional and online outreach into a cohesive process and build a public participation database so you can analyze input, report findings, and make strategic decisions.

• Selectively leverage technology, budget, and staff time.

 

 

Post #460: Notice of intent to do science

Suntrust Bank, Maple and Berry.

At the last Town Council work session, one of the more disturbing exchanges involved traffic counts.  The immediate issue was the implausibly high traffic volume that the Town’s consultant had assumed for the current use of the Suntrust Bank.  The consultant assumed that bank building generated 381 trips during the peak hour of the evening rush hour. 

This sort of thing matters, as I explained in Post #364.  If you overstate the existing traffic, then you understate the impact that MAC development will have on traffic.

Councilman Majdi questioned that figure.  And eventually they shut him down with the claim that this estimate was Science.  You can hear that about 1:18 into my recording (see Post #450).

As a person who has on rare occasion actually done science, that nonsense claim really got under my skin.  You can read Post #364 to see how crude the basic ITE ratebook methodology is.  In this case, because this is a very large bank building, and has a (two-lane) drive-through window, the consultant took a figure out a rate book, multiplied by the bank’s high total floor area, and came up with that number as the estimate of current traffic.

So, instead, I’m going to do some actual science.  I’m going to count the trips there, during evening rush hour, on a day to-be-determined, next week.  Part of actually doing science is announcing that ahead of time, so that I can’t discard the information if it doesn’t match my expectations.  (This avoids “publication bias”, in which negative results never see the light of day.)

Is one day’s observation perfect?  No.  Can I guarantee that counting by hand will be error-free?  No.  And blah blah blah, for those of you who want to trash-talk this ahead of time.

Will this be good enough to make my point?  Yep, I’m fairly confident of that.  My point being that the ITE ratebook methodology can be wildly off.  To me, the only question is whether the consultant’s estimate is off by more than a factor of ten (“order of magnitude) or not.

Why am I so confident about this?  Because I can do simple arithmetic.  Check the face validity of 381 trips by doing some long division.  That works out to a car going in or out of Suntrust every 10 seconds, steadily, for an hour.  Have you ever seen that happen?   At that bank?  Heck, at any Vienna bank?  Double heck,  at any Vienna business establishment, period?  Maybe one of the busier shopping centers, in its entirety.  But at a bank?  Not a chance.  I walk Maple at evening rush hour all the time (I did so yesterday).  Ain’t no way that bank does anything like that amount of business.

The point being that not only is the number wildly incorrect, it was not subjected to even the simplest check of face validity.  And if you find one like that, it’s a pretty fair bet you’ve got some other zingers in there as well.

(Need another face validity check?  Peak traffic on Maple is something like 2400 cars per hour.  The Suntrust 381 trips (in and out) equates to about 190 vehicles.  So, Suntrust, by itself, accounts for 8% of the traffic on Maple, during rush hour?  Nah.)

I think maybe everybody involved here has lost track of what the ITE ratebook methodology actually is.  It’s an agreed-upon methodology used to satisfy certain legal requirements.  It’s not science.

This number — and others like it — are why Majdi pressed for using actual (“hard”) counts of traffic in any further analysis.  Sure, for the future, we have to rely on some sort of projection.  But for the traffic we have now, we can actually count that.  And, if the 381 is an indication, we clearly should.

And as an extras-for-experts, I’m going to take apart the ill-defined notion of “bypass trips”.  Beyond the counts themselves, the subtraction of assumed “bypass trips” is the next-largest potential source of error in that traffic projection.

 

 

Post #459: Park once, shop many and mixed-use trip reduction.

Google Earth view of the Giant Food shopping center parking lot.  Maple Avenue is at the top of the image.

When I was first introduced to MAC zoning, I assumed that, somewhere, somebody had done some hard analysis of how MAC was supposed to work.  Much later, I came to realize that often was not true.  Much of the analysis never went much beyond using current urban-planning phrases, combined with the hope that somehow those things would happen here.  There really wasn’t any analysis of how, exactly, that would work on Maple Avenue.

I could list a few, but if you read this blog, you can fill those in on your own by now.  If you want to see one, look at Post #302, on “destination shopping”.  The last graphic in the post is a stark contrast between actually creating a true destination shopping district (in this case, the Mosaic District), and just saying those words about Maple Avenue.

In this post, I’m going to drill down into two related concepts:  “Park once, shop many” and “mixed use trip reduction”.  These are routinely touted as advantages of mixed-use development.  My point is that if you actually look at the details, on Maple Avenue, you quickly realize that there’s not much there, there.  Quantitatively, the impact of these factors, on Maple, is apt to be quite small. Continue reading Post #459: Park once, shop many and mixed-use trip reduction.

Post #458: The 11/13/2019 Planning Commission work session on Sunrise at 380 Maple West

380 Maple Ave W - Sunrise view of four sides

Source:  Plans posted by the Town of Vienna for the 11/8/2019 meeting of the Vienna BAR (.pdf), by Rust | Orling Architecture, Alexandria VA.

There is no doubt in my mind that when it comes time to vote, the Planning Commission will approve this building.

All the rest is commentary.  What follows is a handful of items that I thought might be worth noting. Continue reading Post #458: The 11/13/2019 Planning Commission work session on Sunrise at 380 Maple West

Post #456: Fairfax County’s 527 Plan for Maple Avenue

Source:  Linked from terminator.fandom.com

I am not yet done posting about all the interesting items that popped up at the 11/7/2019 Town Council work session.  This post is about an offhand remark that Councilman Noble made, regarding the “Tysons 527 plan” for Maple Avenue.

I have to admit my ignorance here, because I had no clue what he meant.  But it sounded somewhat important.  So, after some digging, this turns out to be the long-rumored Fairfax County plan that calls for widening parts of Maple Avenue.  If you plan to be in Vienna a decade from now, it will be well worth your time to have a look at that.  The time frame for this report is the year 2030.

I cannot over-emphasize that this is all theoretical.  This is about dealing with somebody’s guess (projection) of traffic in the year 2030, based on a guess (projection) of additional development at Tysons.  As far as I can tell, nobody has any actual plan for doing any of this to Maple Avenue.  At least, for now.

So, first caveat:  These are not firm plans for anything.  Hence the picture at the top of the page.  I have no clue as to whether or not anyone could actually require that Route 123 be changed in this fashion.  I believe this is merely Fairfax County’s way of showing might be done, to certain Maple Avenue intersections, in response to the additional traffic load that Tysons development might create.

And, second caveat:  We may not get all this projected traffic after all.  Public discussion about this Chapter 527 filing brought up some opinions that the additional traffic wouldn’t flow down Maple at all.  These projections were made more than a decade ago.  And, for the last decade, there has been no increase in actual Maple Avenue traffic (Post #398).  In fact, if you download the spreadsheet, you can see that average daily traffic on Maple has declined slightly over the last decade or so.  So what you are looking at below is based on the opinion, of one set of traffic engineers, as to the impact that Tysons development would have on Maple.  Don’t get the impression that this is the only opinion, or that there isn’t a lot of uncertainty about that opinion, or that the projected additional Maple Avenue traffic must materialize.  So far, it hasn’t.

That said, as I have been hearing about this terrible report for years, I’m going to summarize what it says.  At the least, it shows you what some set of traffic engineers thought it would take to fix a couple of difficult intersections on Maple Avenue.  But keep the caveats above in mind.  The sections of this post describe:

Continue reading Post #456: Fairfax County’s 527 Plan for Maple Avenue

Post #455: Public meetings this week regarding MAC zoning

There is just one meeting this week with some relevance to MAC zoning. 

Wednesday, 11/13/2019, at 7:00 PM in Town Hall, the Planning Commission will hold a work session on Sunrise Assisted Living at 380 Maple West (Maple and Wade Hampton).  They will consider changes to the proffers for 380 Maple West and discuss the conditional use permit that Sunrise will need to operate an assisted living facility at that location.

The relevant materials can be found here:
https://vienna-va.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=4217120&GUID=1C455D37-3102-4E09-A93B-41C6D85EE47B&Options=&Search=

Post #453: Noise abatement, addendum: Plantings don’t reduce noise.

Today I have the joy of doing a posting that nobody is going to believe.  To the best of my understanding, the following statements are true.

With one possible exception, plantings of any sort, of a scale that can be included in the MAC streetscape, will have no material effect on traffic noise as heard at the sidewalk.  There are psychological advantages, and certainly aesthetic advantages, and possibly some modest health advantages to greenery adjacent to a city street.  But noise reduction is not one of them.

As far as I can tell, this is something that most experts on noise abatement agree with.  And that every expert on landscaping disagrees with.

The one exception is the type of green wall where the entire wall is covered with a sound-absorbing medium, on which plants may grow.  And even there, the noise reduction is due to the sound-absorbing growing medium, and only trivially to the plants. Continue reading Post #453: Noise abatement, addendum: Plantings don’t reduce noise.