Category: Analysis

Anything that I have tested empirically, or explain with detailed calculations, or just generally bother to get all the facts straight.

Post #521: The cost of sidewalks

Source:  Google maps.

The point of this post is pretty simple:  The cost of installing new concrete sidewalks various enormously.   And the cost of the sidewalk itself — i.e., the 5′-wide ribbon of concrete — is the least of it.  The bulk of the cost is in everything else that has to be done — curb, gutter, curb cuts, ramps, and, most importantly, drainage including storm sewers.

To make this point, I identified four sidewalk projects in the Town of Vienna, and estimated cost per linear foot.  (Detail given below.  This is a “sample of convenience”, being the first four projects I ran across.)  The costs were $100, $150, $445, and $666 per linear foot of sidewalk.  Presumably, if I’d looked at a larger sample of projects, I would have seen even more variation.

In the Town of Vienna, a) there’s really no meaningful “typical” cost for putting in sidewalks and b) in any given situation, the cost might be a lot more than you’d think.

The high costs of sidewalks — and the fact that literally “the sidewalk” is typically the smallest part of the cost — has some important implications for a couple of items that I’ve mentioned recently.

Robinson bequest for sidewalks.  At the last Transportation Safety Commission (TSC) meeting, I found out that the Robinson estate bequest for sidewalks in the Town of Vienna was being interpreted as literally that:  payment for the concrete sidewalk, period (Post #518).  Depending on the project, then, the Town would have to pay for everything else to make that sidewalk possible.  That’s certainly going to tilt the use of those funds toward simple projects where (e.g.) there is already curb and gutter in place, with no need for extensive modifications for site drainage.

Sidewalks versus road closure for the neighborhoods behind Sunrise/444 Maple West.  At the last Town Council meeting, citizens offered some things the Town could do to address pedestrian safety and traffic in the neighborhoods adjacent to the proposed Sunrise facility (Post #517).  Among those was the idea of putting in sidewalks on (among other) Glen Avenue.  But Councilman Potter suggested that simply closing Wade Hampton at Glen would be a less costly solution.  And based on these per-foot costs, that seems like a plausible statement.  Based on those four costs per foot, 1400′ of sidewalk for Glen Avenue (pictured above) might cost anywhere from $140,000 to more than $900,000. 

Continue reading Post #521: The cost of sidewalks

Post #519: The tear-down boom and increased residential share of Town property assessments

This is just a quick back-of-the-envelope spurred by a presentation made by the Town’s Director of Finance at the 1/27/2020 Town Council meeting.

One statistic that caught my eye is that the residential share of total property assessments in town rose over the last decade, from 77.5% in 2011 to 81.0% in 2019 (Page 9 of this document (.pdf)).  The Director of Finance suggested that this was one possible justification for hiring the new business development officer for the Town of Vienna.  That is, to help bolster Vienna business and hence assessments.  Conversely, Councilman Majdi suggested that the tear-down boom might account for it, with small houses being torn down to make way for much larger ones.

So, that’s the question here:  Does the increase in residential share of total property assessments mean that commercial real estate in Vienna showed poor price appreciation, compared to residential?  Or is that plausibly just a consequence of the tear-down boom, with small, lower-cost houses in Vienna being systematically replaced by larger, higher-cost houses?

Here, in the crudest way possible, I want to test that.  Can the tear-down boom plausibly account for this change?  In keeping with the idea of a round-numbers calculation, I’m going to do a crude cut at this.  Basically, is the impact of the tear-down boom anywhere near large enough.

So:  My recollection is that, of late, the Town has averaged about 100 tear-downs per year, based on building permit data.  Further, based on a couple of observations, property value for a tear down typically increases by about a million dollars (in 2019 terms), from (say) $0.7M for a small house, to $1.7M for the typical mansion that replaces it.

So, 9 years x 100 houses per year x $1M/house = $900M in additional residential property values, in 2019 dollars, from the cumulative effect of the tear-down boom from 2011 to 2019.   Roughly speaking then, if I net out the crude impact of the tear-downs, I get this table:

Crude impact of tear-down boom on Vienna assessed real estate values
Residential Total Residential %
Actual 2019 4,251,761,320 5,204,854,490 81.7%
Less tear-down impact 900,000,000 900,000,000
2019 less tear-down 3,351,761,320 4,304,854,490 77.9%

And the answer is that the (crude estimate of the) impact of the tear down boom is more-or-less the right size to explain the shift in assessment share in the Town of Vienna.  The difference between the two red numbers, in the table above, is roughly as large as the difference between the two red numbers in the opening paragraph.

In other words, this shift in assessed values in the Town of Vienna doesn’t show any particular problem with our commercial real estate.  Plausibly, it just shows the impact of the replacement of small, lower-cost houses with much larger ones.

This is consistent, I think, with repeated mentions of high rental rates for commercial property along Maple (e.g., in the new Town economic development officer’s “listening tour”).  The complaint is that high rental rates are driving businesses out of Vienna.  But if so, that’s just an indication that business is good along Maple.  Nobody likes paying rent, but if property owners along Maple think they can get (e.g.) $60/square foot/year, that means they expect that business opportunities are such that some business can afford to locate on Maple and pay that kind of rent.

Post #513: Light trespass and protecting housing adjacent to Maple

The Chick-fil-a-car-wash is in the process of getting some exterior modifications to reduce light trespass, that is, excessive and annoying spillover of light onto adjacent properties.  In this case, the spillover is from the interior lighting of that building onto the nearby townhouses.  Councilman Potter championed this change on behalf of the adjacent neighborhood.  Approval for those modifications was supposed to occur at the last meeting of the Board of Architectural Review (BAR), but was postponed.

So, good for them, for being willing to make the changes to reduce their light trespass.  But you have to ask a) why does a brand new building need this retrofit, and b) is this a one-off problem, or a generic problem that needs to be addressed for future buildings as well?

The answers, as far as I can tell are that a) the Town only checks for light spillover on paper, not in the field, and those paper estimates of light spillover have many shortcomings, and b) yeah, there are already indications that this is an underlying problem that should be addressed more broadly and more proactively.

What I’m saying is, don’t think of this as some sort of one-off mistake.  It’s a single example of a generic shortcoming of the zoning process.  It should be addressed as such.  In much the same way that I argued for changing the code to require closing in garages that face residential areas (to control noise pollution), the Town needs to step up its game and provide real checks on light trespass from new commercial development. Continue reading Post #513: Light trespass and protecting housing adjacent to Maple

Post #511: Three followups to the last Town Council work session

Source of this image is linked here.

This is about three unrelated points from the Monday Town Council work session that, in hindsight, struck me as possibly worth writing up:  The Town traffic simulation, the treatment of the Town strategic “plan”, and the end game 18 to 24 months from now.

Town traffic simulation.

Part of the Town’s “Multimodal” traffic study estimated the impact on traffic congestion from Maple Avenue development.  I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the consultants did to arrive at their numbers.  As of last night’s meeting, I have officially given up on that, because I can’t make head or tail out of it.

But I did take away one thing from trying to puzzle that out:  There’s a lot of uncertainty (wiggle room) in that calculation.  That’s worth noting, I think.  See if you can follow this.

  1. Back in August, the contractor presented results showing 758 additional net new evening rush-hour trips from Maple Avenue redevelopment.  They did not talk about it during that presentation, or during their next presentation.  But it was on a slide that they skipped over (Post #358).
  2. One issue I had with that is their “baseline” traffic, i.e., the number of trips that they assumed occurs right now.  Their graphic clearly showed that they assumed that (e.g.) currently-empty buildings were generating traffic on Maple.
  3. The single worst example of that was the assumption that the Suntrust Bank (east) currently gets 381 trips in the afternoon rush hour.  As previously noted, that’s a ludicrous number — it amounts to one car going into or out of that bank parking lot every 10 seconds.  Councilman Majdi called them out on that, but both the contractor and Town Manager strongly defended that as “science”.  I was so ticked by that misuse of the term “science” that I sat in the bank parking lot and counted cars to demonstrate that the actual traffic to that building was about one-tenth of that (Post #465).
  4. When I want to look at the final report, I couldn’t find those 381 trips.  As it turns out, at yesterday’s work session, it was revealed that the contractor removed those 381 existing trips from the baseline.  Simply zeroed them out.  That’s why they are no longer in the report. And so, presumably, we have no further cause for complaint.
  5. OK, fine, I can do arithmetic.  If they remove 381 from the baseline, that should then add 381 to the net new trips.  (Why?  Because you net out the existing traffic, when calculating the net new traffic.  If you reduce existing traffic by 381, then you should have increased the net new traffic from development by 381.
  6. And yet … in the final report, the net new trips from Maple Avenue actually decreased from 758 to 500.

So, without pondering how they justified that, just do the math.  Focus on the simple arithmetic of how they had to have gotten from the prior estimate to the current estimate.  Solve for X:  758 + 381 + X = 500.  Turns out, X = -639.  That is, they managed to extract a further 639 net new trips out of their analysis, to get from the original estimate that (presumably) netted out the Suntrust 381 in the baseline, to the final estimate that did not.  Just as a matter of arithmetic.

This X factor of -639 trips is what economists call a structural uncertainty in the estimate (as opposed to a statistical uncertainty).  It’s the uncertainty that arises from doing the numbers one plausible way versus another (as opposed to a more traditional statistical uncertainty, which arises from purely random factors, so to speak).

So this lower bound for the true stuctural uncertainty of the estimate — how much it changes based on choices made by the analyst — is larger than the estimate itself.

A lot of other things about the methods and results looked counterintuitive to me.  For example, the net new traffic during the AM rush hour, to the extent that it left Vienna, flowed mostly westward (i.e., against the direction of morning rush hour traffic).  About 2.5x as many additional cars exited Vienna at Nutley as at Follin.  But put those issues aside.  The simple arithmetic of getting from the draft to the final — the X above — is what convinced me that I would never have any real understanding of how they arrived at their numbers.

So this is truly a black box, and a black box it shall remain.  There are open-source software packages that allows individuals to model transportation networks (e.g., here, here, or here.)  All of them require considerable amounts of data as input (e.g., traffic light timings, traffic counts).  I’m not going to put in the effort to try to gin up my own estimate.  But my conclusion is that this is the only way to avoid having the results be a total black box.

Addendum:  Traffic counts and the K-Q curve.

Addendum:  I also have no clue what these traffic models do when actual traffic passes the peak of the “K-Q curve”.  (Briefly, as you try to stuff more and more vehicles through a given roadway (increase the density of cars per square foot, traditionally represented by “K”), each individual car may move more slowly, but in aggregate, the total flow of cars (represented by the letter “Q”) increases.  That is, at first, each car may move slower, but you get more total cars moving through the road segment.  But as you continue to add cars, you reach a point where the reverse is true:  You get so crowded that adding more cars actually reduces total traffic flow.  Not only does each car move more slowly, but you actually get fewer total cars to pass through the road segment in a given amount of time.  That point — where jamming more cars onto the road actually begins to reduce not just speed, but total traffic flow — that’s the peak of the K-Q curve, as in this diagram (k = density of cars, q = total flow of cars through the roadway, v = average car speed).

Source:  Wikipedia.

As I understand it, this is the reason you will see (e.g.) metered on-ramps (ramps with traffic lights) at the on-ramps to the inside-the-beltway portion of I-66.  They are trying to avoid passing the peak of the K-Q curve.   Once you pass that peak, you are helping nobody by allowing more cars onto the roadway.  Not only does every individual car move slower, but you actually get fewer total cars to pass down the highway in a given amount of time.  All you do is increase the size of the backup.

It sure seems to me that we hit the peak of the K-Q curve during morning rush hour.  At least sometimes.  At the point where traffic from the Courthouse and Maple light backs up all the way to Nutley, it’s tough for me to imagine what we haven’t hit and passed the maximum possible through-put of the Maple-Courthouse intersection.  Here we are, just before 9 AM, looking east and west on Maple, at the Nutley Street intersection.

But here’s the technical question.  Look at the diagram above and think of the curved line as a hill.  In terms of traffic counts, you get the same traffic count if you are halfway up the upslope of the hill (before the peak of the K-Q curve, where traffic is light and moving well) as you do halfway down the downslope side of the hill (past the peak, where traffic is packed and moving slowly).

I think this explains one oddity of the report, in that the consultants seem to think that we have one long rush hour period from about 8 AM to about noon.  Because they are looking at the traffic counts, and the flow of cars is about the same throughout that period.  Like so:  The flow of traffic (cars/hour) is the same at 9 AM as it is at 11 AM.

Source:  Vienna multimodal transit report, 12/20/2019 draft, page 3-13.

But as anyone who drives that road can tell you, there’s a stark difference in the level of traffic queues or waiting times between 9 AM and 11 AM.  Just before 9, traffic routinely looks like the pictures above.  Whereas around 11 AM, traffic flows far more freely.  But you see no difference on the graph above, because the traffic counts, by themselves, are blind to the fact that Maple hits capacity during the rush hour.  The count you get when you are on the downslope side of the K-Q curve (just before 9 AM, with huge backups as pictured above) is the same as the count you get when you’re still on the upslope of the curve (around 11 AM say, when traffic moves pretty well).

So that’s just an oddity that I noticed.  Traffic counts (cars/hour) do not, by themselves, accurately measure traffic, because of the ambiguity caused by hitting the peak of the K-Q curve.  Very light traffic and very heavy traffic can generate identical traffic counts.  And the graph just above doesn’t show that we have one long rush hour.  It just shows that the total traffic counts don’t change much between the absolute peak of the AM crunch (which I place at about 8:45 AM) and the must less crowded mid-morning period.  I think that, as much as anything, demonstrates that we hit some measure of capacity on Maple during AM rush hour.  Once you hit capacity on Maple — as I infer that we due during the AM rush — additional traffic does not result in additional traffic counts.

I’ll mention one other truly weird possibility.  At this most recent meeting, Coucilman Noble made much out of the new traffic light system that Vienna is getting.  (I have the vague notion that VDOT, not the TOV, is responsible for that, but that doesn’t matter).  If that traffic light system actually increases throughput during the periods when Maple is at capacity (something that I doubt will happen, per discussion of capacity above, but is possible), then, by traffic counts alone, it will make it look as if traffic has gotten worse during rush hour.  That’s just another example of the way in which traffic counts, alone, can provide a misleading indicator of traffic when a road is at capacity.  If there’s a fundamental change in the roadway (in this case, new light timing), traffic (counts) going up can mean that traffic (wait times) is going down.

And as a final, final note on that, if the Town of Vienna wants Vienna citizens to be aware of some profound benefit they are going to get from new traffic signals, I suggest that they actually provide at least some sort of description of what they intend to do.  Near as I can tell, the entirety of what Vienna has to say about this project is a total of 23 words on this page on the Town of Vienna website.  Normally, as you may realize, I will do my homework to understand what the Town is about.  But from the description, I can’t even find the words to Google up what this is.

 

Town Strategic “Plan”

In theory (and by law), anything the Town of Vienna government does needs to comply with the Town’s strategic plan.  But if you look back at when the Town developed MAC zoning, they developed MAC zoning (2014), then rewrote the strategic plan (“mixed use development) to match it (2015-2016).

This more-than-begs the question of what you mean by “plan”, if you rewrite the plan to match what you subsequently decided to do.  I have a vague idea that it isn’t even remotely legal to do that.

That said, based on the last work session, that’s the plan going forward.  When Councilman Majdi brought up the idea of addressing the comprehensive plan first, that was (of course) immediately shot down.  The agreed-upon sequence is now to rewrite the zoning (with apparently no restrictions whatsoever), and then once again rewrite the comprehensive plan to match whatever comes out of the zoning rewrite, if necessary.

Just in passing, and to underscore how loosey-goosey this is, Town staff have now set it up so that this Town Council is actually providing less guidance to this process than occurred during the original development of MAC zoning.  At least, under MAC, Town Council somehow arrived at a firm limit on building height.  Here … near as I can tell, anything goes.  Town Council has not publicly agreed on even one single thing that they want to see in a revised MAC zoning.  It’s all up to the Department of Planning and Zoning.  That’s no surprise, given that Planning and Zoning appears to be controlling this process.

Looking 18 months down the road.

Fundamentally, the limit on the density of development on Maple Avenue appears to be a political limit.  It’s really about what the median Vienna voter wants.  There’s no technical barrier to filling Maple Avenue with Chick-fil-A-car-washes.  It’s just that the people who live here do not, on average, seem very fond of that idea, and they will vote for people who say they won’t do that.

This is all the more true if you purposefully ignore any other possible limits to growth.  E.g., if you will not discuss development in the context of the capacity of Maple to move traffic, or in the context of impacts on nearby residential neighborhoods.  Barring all that — if you acknowledge no other limits — then the only limit on the density of Maple Avenue development is a political limit.

This is a point that Councilman Majdi brought up at that work session.  And either his fellow Council members didn’t get it, or they just shot it down as sort of knee-jerk reaction.

So I need to point out the following:  Town staff have structured this process so that our elected officials have no say in shaping the new MAC.  They will have no formal input in what happens to MAC zoning until the very end of the process.  The process will be controlled by the Department of Planning and Zoning, with input from the Planning Commission (still largely staffed by holdovers from prior Town Council.)  Only at the very end of the process will Town Council be presented with the finished products.

Councilmember Patel tried to reverse that — to get Town Council to have first say over the shape of the revised MAC zoning — and got quashed by the pro-MAC members of Town Council.

So I’m just pointing out the disconnect here.  The only functional limit on MAC density is a political limit.  And our political body is (formally, at least) completely shut out of the process of shaping the new MAC, until the very end.

The only logical conclusion is that this is likely to end (or, at least, risks ending) in some sort of train wreck.  The people actually structuring the new MAC are not subject to any political constraint — they are not elected.  And the people who are elected are not part of the MAC-rewrite process.  That’s exactly what the response to Councilmember Patel established.  But in the end, the constraint on what can and can’t be done is a political one.   So this is a fundamental mis-alignment of incentives, and poor overlap between scope of authority and scope of responsibility.  Town Council is going to be responsible for what comes out of this process, but they have been stripped of all authority to shape it.  

What guarantees that Town Council will be handed a new MAC that is politically acceptable?  Nothing.  The process is literally and purposefully structured that way.  Any notion that Town Council would offer overall guidance (by having first crack at proposals) was firmly snuffed out at this past Town Council work session.

And that’s the scenario that I reckon as a train wreck.  Suppose the very-pro-development Department of Planning and Zoning, working in a political vacuum, comes up with a zoning proposal that appears unacceptable to the median Vienna voter.  Then what happens?

I believe that Town staff are actually counting on that possibility of train wreck.  That is, they are counting on being able to cram this down Town Council’s throats, at the end of the process, one way or the other.  They think that those who oppose larger buildings and higher-density development will blink, in order to avoid that train wreck.  (E.g., to avoid vetoing a proposal that too two years and a quarter-million-dollar contract to develop, and that includes a bunch of purely technical and non-controverial fixes to Town Code in addition to a rewritten MAC.)  By refusing to separate out the non-controversial “clean up” portion of this work, from the more controversial changes to Town zoning, they can given Town Council a one-vote take-it-or-leave it choice (as I have already noted, per Post #483 and others).

Or, possibly, they are hoping that this next election will lead to a change in the fortunes of the pro-MAC portion of Town Council.  So that by the time this comes to a vote, they’ll have the votes for a higher-density MAC zoning.  That’s certainly possible.  From what I can tell, the anti-MAC forces seem totally disorganized at this point.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Post #505: Revisiting #2: Let’s move the Noah’s Ark meeting into the 21st century.

Read Post #480 for the definition, and Post #495 for how this applies to Town’s decision to establish the rules for rewriting all the zoning in Vienna in private, out of the public view.

In a nutshell:

  • Under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), any time three* or more members of a public body gather to discuss public business, that’s a public meeting.
  • All public meetings have to be open to the public, unless there’s some well-defined reason for having a closed meeting.  The statute identifies a specific list of such reasons (e.g., personnel actions).
  • A meeting of two members of a public body is not a public meeting.  It has to be three or more.

* Or, if a quorum is fewer than three.  So if there’s a two-person subcommittee, if those two people meet to discuss public business, that’s a public meeting.

OK, now think like a bureaucrat.  How do you dodge the clear intent of the Virginia FOIA, and manage to hold a meeting of (e.g.) seven members of the Town Council, but bar the public?

Simple:  You break your meeting up into little pieces, where each piece only has two Town Council members present.  Let me term each such piece of the overall meeting a “meetinglet”.

A single meetinglet, by itself, is more-or-less useless.  But now, instead of one meeting with all seven present, you hold a coordinated series of meetinglets, one after the other, with Town Staff providing information on what has been said in all prior discussions.  For legal purposes, instead of that being treated as one meeting of seven people that has been broken up into meetinglets, the law treats each meetinglet separately.

Hence, “Noah’s Ark” meeting, because you bring in the Town Council two-by-two.  You break the seven-person meeting into a series of two-person meetinglets, and presto, it’s legal.

Continue reading Post #505: Revisiting #2: Let’s move the Noah’s Ark meeting into the 21st century.

Post #488: A followup and correction on the 2020 bond issue

For the record, I need to correct what I said about the 2020 bond issue (Post #485).  It’s the part where I summarized it as: “Can they really pay that back?  I think the answer is a qualified yes.”

I believe that’s not true if they borrow the full $35M that they have been authorized to borrow.  I don’t think they can do that without violating their stated minimum reserve requirements for their capital fund, based on their current economic model.  And I didn’t realize that until I saw all the details presented at last night’s Town Council meeting.

I realize it’s too late to do anything, as the Town Council approved the bond issue.  But I think it’s worth stating this for the record.  Just on the off chance that anybody in Town government cares about it.  Presumably, Town staff will redo the reserves calculation just prior to the time of bond issuance using updated information.

Continue reading Post #488: A followup and correction on the 2020 bond issue

Post #473: No standards for pedestrian sight lines

This post is a courtesy for the Vienna Transportation Safety Commission (TSC).

The first point is to provide a convenient reference to Post #424, which is my summary of the Chick-fil-A drive-through exit hazard.  In a nutshell, I think that the obstructed view of the sidewalk there constitutes a clear hazard to pedestrians and bicyclists, on what is now a walk-to-school route thanks to the Madison HAWK light.

At tonight’s (11/25/2019) TSC meeting, I’m going to ask the Town to do something about that.

My second point is that there does not seem to be any technical guidance on this issue whatsoever, from either the Virginia Department of Transportation or from Federal sources.  The issue being, specifically, when a driveway meets a sidewalk next to a public road, what constitutes adequate sight lines between drivers in the driveway, and pedestrians on the sidewalk.   (So, not an issue of driver-to-driver sight lines, but driver-to-sidewalk-pedestrian sight lines.)

Best I’ve seen, so far, from VDOT or federal sources, is a vague statement that one should have adequate sight lines.  And that’s in the context of roadway intersections, not driveways entering a roadway.

After considerable searching, I found a handful of municipalities that addressed this exact issue.  Near as I can tell, all of them ask for the area to be kept clear of visual obstructions 10 feet or more back from the sidewalk, when a driveway enters a roadway.  This should be contrasted with the 1-foot distances between the sidewalk and the obstruction (a 5′ tall transformer box) at the Chick-fil-A drive-through exit. 

So, if you were looking for solid evidence that the situation at the Chick-fil-A drive-through exit is hazardous, here are four cities that would have banned it.  These are all standards for vehicle-pedestrian sight lines.

Lincoln, NE (.pdf) says you can have no obstructions with 10 feet of the sidewalk where a driveway enters a street.  Like so:

City of Kirkland, WA requires a 22′ setback, as measured along the sidewalk, but they assume that cars will be moving 10 MPH down a driveway.  Not sure this is relevant.

Bellevue, WA says 14′ from the back edge of the sidewalk must be kept clear, but that’s measured in the middle of the travel lane.

City of Albuquerque requires 11′ be kept clear around residential driveways.

I think this is enough to show that where this issue of pedestrian visibility at driveways is explicitly addressed, the required setbacks from the sidewalk that must be clear of visual obstruction vastly exceed what we have at the Chick-fil-A drive through exit.

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 #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.