San Jose Pedestrian & Bike Survey Project (public event)

Seeking volunteers to hand-address envelopes for our survey, Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Please see details below!

We are in need of volunteers on Tuesday, January 26, and Wednesday, January 27, from 6:00 - 9:00 p.m. On both days we will meet in Washington Square Hall, room 216, on the San Jose State campus. The main entrance to the building is on 4th Street, directly opposite the Paseo San Antonio. You'll find a campus map here: http://www.sjsu.edu/about_sjsu/docs/SJSU_campus_map.pdf

Our activity will be to hand-address the envelopes in which the survey will be sent out. (Hand-addressing the envelopes increases the likelihood that people respond to the survey, meaning that we can get more responses while sending out fewer total surveys.)

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DETAILS ABOUT THE RESEARCH PROJECT FROM THE ORGANIZER

This survey is being conducted as a research project funded by the Mineta Transportation Institute at SJSU. I am working with colleagues Ann Forsyth (Cornell University) and Kevin Krizek (University of Colorado).

The formal goal of the project is to develop a low-cost, simple survey that cities can use to measure the amount of walking and cycling in their communities. Such a survey is needed because the current big travel behavior surveys, like the National Household Travel Survey, don't capture enough people within most cities to provide useful data at the city-level. And when cities hire consultants to do bike/ped surveys for them, this tends to be quite expansive. On completion of the project, my colleagues and I will prepare a "manual" that includes not only the recommended survey questionnaire but also detailed instructions about how to implement the survey and interpret the results.

The original project proposal called for me and my colleagues to send out enough surveys to get 200 back, which would be enough for us to test the survey method but not enough to provide useful data for the city being used for the test. It occurred to us that by getting some volunteer help, we could afford to mail out more surveys and thus, hopefully, get back enough completed ones to provide useful data for the city in question -- at no financial cost to the city. That's where you all come in! Our goal is to get back 600 completed surveys. (For those of you who like statistics, 600 responses from a City of San Jose's size should give us results with a confidence level of 95% and a confidence interval of +/- 4 %.)