Author: chogan@directresearch.com

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.

Post #454: If only we had a parks master plan?

Page 120, Town of Vienna 2015 Comprehensive Plan.  Areas in red have adequate access to parks, per our definition.

Vienna parks map

 

“If only we had a parks master plan, we could then ask MAC developers to proffer funds for Vienna parks.”

I’ve heard that said, in various forms, by various Town authorities.  Most recently, it was said in passing at the last Town Council meeting.  I even repeated that in Post #442, about ways to get open space from MAC.

And yet, something about that has always seemed a bit off to me.  Given the importance that citizens place on open space, then, well, why don’t we have a master plan for parks?  What’s stopping us?  Who’s in charge of getting that done?  And so on.

For sure, if this is bound up with the required once-every-five-year review of the Town comprehensive plan, we have the option to review and modify the comprehensive plan at any point.  We don’t have to wait for that.  The law says “at least” every five years, not at most.

So I am struck by the incredible discrepancy between the effort going into rewriting the entire Town of Vienna zoning code — hiring more staff, a quarter-million-dollar contract to a consultant, and so on — versus the (zero?  low-key?) effort to get a parks master plan written.  It’s almost as if having a parks master plan doesn’t really matter, in terms of getting proffers for park land.

And maybe it doesn’t.

After doing my homework, I believe that opening sentence is incorrect.  At least, as things stand now, and as I vaguely understand proffers.  Putting economics aside (i.e., can developers afford to pay for that, and bury the power lines, and provide open space on Maple, and so on), I think it’s a false hope.

Briefly (with detail to follow):

  1. We’ve already stated that Maple Avenue has good access to parks, in our comprehensive plan.  That’s shown on the map above — the red circles are the parts of the Town of Vienna within a quarter-mile of some park.
  2. We’ve defined our parks problem as one of access, not parks acreage per capita.  Adding more people (on Maple) therefore literally can’t create a problem with access to parks, by our measure.  Again, we stated this in our comprehensive plan.
  3. There’s not even a demonstrable problem for Vienna as a whole in terms of park acres per capita.  If you calculate park acreage per capita for Vienna versus other local jurisdictions, we are not particularly short of park space.
  4. So we can’t ask Maple Avenue developers to proffer funds for more parks.  We can only ask for a proffer if we can prove that their development is directly causing a problem.  But, per our current comprehensive plan, there isn’t (and can’t be) a park access problem caused by development on Maple.

The upshot is that I think we need to eliminate that section of the comprehensive plan, first, before we even have a shot at asking for proffers for parks.  And I think it’s possible that because we’ve already said what we said in the current comprehensive plan, we may not be able to ask for proffers for parks, period.  That’s something the lawyers would have to figure out.

Separately, I found out a few oddities about our Vienna’s current (2015) comprehensive plan.  I’ll summarize those at the end.  Turns out, the Town is well aware of these issues, as they were pointed out in 2016.

1: We’ve already stated that Maple Avenue has good access to parks, in our comprehensive plan.  That’s shown on the map above — the red circles are the parts of the Town of Vienna within a quarter-mile of some park.

Here’s what the Town of Vienna says it needs to do for parks, in the current comprehensive plan (.pdf, page 119):

Several “service gaps” exist in Town. Service gaps are defined as areas where residents do not have access to Town parks within a 5-10 minute walk from their homes. The map on Page 120 shows these gaps. Salsbury Spring was not included in this analysis due to its use as a passive park. The Town should consider ways to expand parks and recreational options in areas not located within close walking distance of existing parks.

If you look on the map above, most of Maple Avenue is (mostly) not in a “service gap”.  Most of Maple is within a quarter-mile of some park.  It’s mostly the areas in the south of town, well away from Maple, where there are large “service gaps”.

2: We’ve defined our parks problem as one of access, not parks acreage per capita.  The comprehensive plan map above shows roughly quarter-mile rings around each park.  That quarter-mile figure is commonly used by urban planners the distance that most individuals would routinely walk.

There’s nothing said about the size of the park, relative to the size of the population its supposed to serve.  Given that the Town chose to identify park adequacy this way, adding more people (on Maple) literally can’t create a problem with access to parks.  Our measure isn’t based on park acres per capita, it’s based solely on whether or not you can plausibly way to some park.

3:  Further, by calculation, Vienna as a whole is not short of park space per capita relative to other local jurisdictions. 

Falls Church did that analysis in its Parks for People document (.pdf).  Vienna is middle-of-the-road in terms of locally-run park acres per capita, and this does not even count (e.g.) the W&OD park and other parks not under Vienna’s sole control.  We rank ahead of Falls Church, but behind the City of Fairfax.

3B:  An aside on Vienna parks.

The Vienna number in the table above is close to, but not identical to, what I get when I do that calculation.  And that’s in part because it’s not clear what should and should not be counted as a park.  And much of Vienna’s park land is not owned outright by the Town of Vienna.

Town of Vienna parks, were, at least originally, almost totally unplanned.  Some parks, such as Meadow Lane, were built on land donated by developers (.pdf).  But Southside and Northside parks are there because they were once the location of the Town’s main sewage treatment plants (.pdf).  They became parks after the Town connected to regional sewage treatment facilities.  In effect, they are located for maximum inconvenience.  They were put as far away from the bulk of the (then) Vienna population as possible.   It is unsurprising, then, that the Town’s comprehensive plan notes the uneven distribution of park area throughout the Town.

Oddly, the second-largest park in Vienna, by acreage, is the W&OD trail.  The right-of-way is about 100′ wide, and the Vienna portion is two miles long, resulting in 24 acres of park.  (My calculation there exactly matches what is shown on the Fairfax County tax map.)

If you count all the more-or-less public park areas within the Town of Vienna, it looks like this.  Note that the inclusion of park areas not directly or solely controlled by Vienna boosts the 6.7 acres per 1000 (above) to 8.3 acres.

4:  So we can’t ask Maple Avenue developers to proffer funds for more parks.  We can only ask for a proffer if we can prove that their development is directly causing a problem.  But, per our current comprehensive plan, there isn’t (and can’t be) a park access problem caused by development on Maple.

Here’s a short summary, though I’m not sure it’s the best summary, of the law.  You have to prove that development is placing some burden on some public facility above its existing capacity; you have to prove that the developer benefits from this public facility; and you can only charge in proportion to the developer’s actual impact on that facility, among all users.

My point is, we don’t even have a concept of what “capacity” means for Town of Vienna parks.  Our sole measure of park adequacy, in our comprehensive plan, is based on distance to the nearest park.  And, on the whole, we are not “over capacity” in our parks, at least in terms of how we stack up against other local jurisdictions in terms of park acres per capita.

Given that everything in Vienna is supposed to conform to the comprehensive plan, I think this makes it an uphill battle to ask for proffers for the parks.  To the contrary, the language of the current comprehensive plan seems to make that absolutely impossible.

Analysis

First, I’m not a lawyer, so take this all with a grain of salt.  Maybe there’s some way to dodge around what appears to me to be the plain reading of the comprehensive plan and Virginia’s proffer law.

Second, if there were some newly-defined zone, solely for Maple Avenue, that defined some need for open public space along Maple, then maybe you could get the proffers that way.  Put the need for public plazas along Maple into the comprehensive plan, defined a target for such plaza space per Maple Avenue acre in the comprehensive plan, and ask that new development target the provision of that much open space.  Maybe that would be legal.  But that’s not a parks master plan, that’s specific to Maple Avenue.

Third, it would be a lot simpler if the Town would just buy open space if it wants it. Maybe the upshot is that, as far as open space from MAC development is concerned, the Town is going to have to do it the hard way:  Pay for it.

Fourth, I think this also makes the idea of using the Patrick Henry library site as a way to buy some sheltered public green space along Maple even more critical (Post #369, Post #371  The alternative is to believe that, despite evidence so far to the contrary, we can write a law that will require developers to provide pleasant, open public space.

Finally, a close look at the comprehensive plan reveals some oddities.

First, Commonwealth statute says that every locality must review its comprehensive plan at least every five years.  Nothing prevents the Town from updating it more frequently than that.

Second, for the last revision, the Town took two years to do an extensive revision of the plan.  They started in 2013, ended substantive work in 2015, and Town Council adopted the document in 2016.  Clearly, they are not planning to do much this time around, or certainly nothing like that effort.

Third, the comprehensive plan in effect when MAC was passed (2014) was the 2010 plan, which says nothing about mixed-use development on Maple.  So the Town passed MAC, then appears to have modeled that portion of the (2015) comprehensive plan after the MAC statute.  I don’t think it’s supposed to work that way.  But, this being Town of Vienna, I guess that doesn’t matter.

I am not the first one to note this, as a citizen made this exact point at the March 23, 2016 Planning Commission meeting.

Fourth, I can’t tell when the next plan review is due, as the the Town mentions many different dates.

So, the 2010 comprehensive plan is referred to as the March 15, 2010 plan, and states clearly and unambiguously:

Approved as amended by the Planning Commission: January 27, 2010
Adopted by the Mayor and Town Council: March 15, 2010

But the 2015 comprehensive plan?  Well, you tell me.  The only clear statement is:

Adopted by Town Council on May 23, 2016

Assuming that’s true, then the Town of Vienna did not comply with Commonwealth statute.  More than five years elapsed between the prior review and the current one.  Again, I am not the first person to have noted that.  In the April 13, 2016 Planning Commission meeting, a citizen brought up this exact point, and the Town asserted that because it began its review of the comprehensive plan before the five years were up, then it had not violated the spirit of the law.  Or some such.  Basically, typical Town of Vienna.

The current document does not say when the Planning Commission approved the “2015” comprehensive plan, but it appears that there was one joint hearing in which the PC and TC did their thing, and the plan was adopted.  In 2016.  So it looks like there is only one date for the current comprehensive plan.

Trying to read between the lines, it looked like something chaotic was going on at that point.  This is the 2015 plan.  But it was passed in 2016.  There appears to have been no formal approval by the Planning Commission prior to literally the public hearing where the Town Council passed it.  All of that seems quite unusual compared to prior comprehensive plans.  But I have no idea why.

I think the upshot of all that is that the Town won’t have to (begin to) review the Comprehensive Plan again until 2021.  I have to wonder what other towns do, and if they have adopted the same interpretation of the law as the Town of Vienna.  In any case, Vienna could choose to do that review and change the comprehensive plan prior to that date.