Transportation Survey Comments

I just watched my boyfriend take our survey, and we found a few things that confused us. I am not sure if these need/can be changed, but I just wanted to make everyone aware. Hopefully other people will add their thoughts here too. Anyway, we thought that it would be helpful to say how much parking permits currently cost when asking how raising the price would impact the survey taker. Also, my boyfriend said that there already is an electronic ride board. Are we trying to find out if people are aware of it? Or, are we asking if we want another kind of electronic system?

Hope that helps!

Spring Break and Beyond

Happy Friday,

Just a reminder that Mission Advertise starts a week from this Sunday night and will continue Monday morning. Amanda and I will need help putting up table tents (one per table), posters (we have a list of places), tying up the banner, placing lawn signs (campus mall and south side of Davies), and chalking! Amanda and I will be doing the display case, as well.

We have everything reserved from April 5-7 (Monday-Wednesday) of next week, so they need to go up quickly to get the word out as much as possible. We can continue chalking throughout, and the Axis TV's (Davies) will have information up throughout as well. In addition, I am meeting with the Spectator this morning to try to convince them to run an article-line with Green/Carbon Footprint information and a follow-up of our study.

Back to things you can help with: We will provide all of the materials needed - all we need is you to show up! Please email me with your availability and if you have a specific job that you'd like to do.

Thanks, and enjoy spring break! (Remember to track your miles to your destination!)

Andi

Survey to be Opened on Later Date

Hello again, my fellow CNTers-

The Transportation Team (along with Dr. H and Robyn) met this morning for a bit of review work. While editing the survey, we came to the conclusion that with our potential participants already being swamped with surveys and midterms, our difficulty preparing multiple incentives, and the delay in finalizing our "year," we would be better off moving the survey to a later date.

The survey will now be sent out after spring break.

This means that we have a longer time to do test-runs of our survey for clarity and content, and a few more weeks to find incentives. If you have any ideas, suggestions, or incentive-connections, please contact me or another member of the Transportation Team right away and we will take care of it.

In addition, we have decided to use the 2009-2010 fiscal year for our data collection.

While this includes estimations, "Choice 3: July 1, 2009 - June 31, 2010" was by far the most popular choice of our classmates, as shown on our Timeline blog comments. This means that each of the teams using University-recorded data will need to view the data for May and June of previous years in order to estimate the carbon output for May and June 2010 (based on trend). The Transportation Team will be using the June and July 2009 transportation data as June and July 2010 in order to keep our data as accurate as possible. Though the estimations will result in a small drop of data-integrity and reliability, the vast majority of the class believed this to be our best option for the sake of relevance and clarity.

Until Friday,

Andi

Transportation Survey, Rough Draft 4

Hello, CNTers -

The external reviewer has replied and given us many constructive suggestions. I went through the survey and made the changes that I thought were appropriate and have emailed the Transportation Team with the edited version of our survey.
(In case you wanted an update on how it's going!)

Also, the Transportation Team is working hard on finding incentives for the survey. If you know of any ideas or have any great connections, please contact me at: krunnfae@uwec.edu so that we can finalize our prizes.

I will see you all on Friday,
Andi

First Draft of the Transportation Survey

Tonight in the library, Andi Heather and I met to put together the first draft of our Transportation Survey. Although we were rushed to finish this draft in a few days, this meeting was extremely successful. Several issues will need to be discussed further with the class to make a final decision, but we were all impressed with how far the document has already come. Andi will be e-mailing this draft to the transportation team, and I will be printing paper copies to bring to class on Monday (on scrap paper to be environmentally friendly).

I also brought up the suggestion of putting boxes in each of the dorms' computer rooms for scrap paper. Yes, recycling the paper does help the environment, but it would be even better to use both sides of the paper first. Personally, I have often dug through the recycling bin for paper only used on one side to quickly print an email. A box to put store scrap paper would be extremely convenient.

CNT 2008 Survey

I just want to remind you all to look at the transportation portion of the survey that I sent out via e-mail to the class distribution list. I have a few questions for you to think about/discuss:

• What are your thoughts about the questions for last year?
• After looking at the Clean Air Cool Planet Carbon Calculator (CACPCC) what information do we need to enter in?
• What information is viable to get?
• What can we do this time around to make it easier?
• Can we get better results?

*Feel free to discuss the balance between many questions (more questions=increased information) and time it takes a survey taker to complete (more time=decreased responses).

Syracuse Survey

The Syracuse Survey serves as a nice, shallow outline for questions that we may want to ask. If you open the document itself, (which is a Word Document,) take a look at number 17; Liv and I believe that is the best question/comment section. Question 17 gets right at the idea of improvement: How can we increase the use of alternative transportation?

Class Log 2/10/2010

Is it possible for someone to be connected to a place and not feel a responsibility towards it and the surrounding world? We began today's discussion by reading from Kolbert, page 60, and discussing how little people in America today tend to notice the world around them. There are certainly exceptions, such as the Citizen Science Center at Beaver Creek Reserve, but the spread of cities has made it really difficult for people to make connections with specific places, as has been common at other times and places.

From there, we dove into the transportation section of 2008 CNT report.

Suggestions for Questions

Because the University of Pennsylvania didn't have a sample survey available, I came up with some questions based on the medium-impact recommendations (p. 44-46). You can probably infer that the answers would be of the format very likely, somewhat likely, no opinion, somewhat unlikely, very unlikely (or the like, whatever fits in). Here they are:

Portland State University

I thought Portland State University's campus commuter survey was fairly good. I like how they allowed people to choose different ways to commute on different days because often times a student's schedule is different on different days, which could affect how they commute. I think it is interesting that they had survey takers tell how they commuted each day last week. I am wondering if this would give you accurate results or not, since they asked about a specific week and not how people commute in general. I think it is also good to ask what benefits would encourage the survey takers to try alternatives to commuting alone. I also think it is a good idea to have a spot for people to comment on PSU transportation. It was different for them to ask for the survey taker's address. I do not really understand the purpose. Overall, I thought this survey had some very good points for us to consider when doing our survey.

Northeastern Illinois University Commuter Survey

I thought NEIU's commuter survey was decent and provided the university with some information regarding commuter tendencies. It began with a introduction explaining the contents of the survey and what the results were going to be used for. The introduction could have been a little more professionally phrased, but for the most part it served its purpose.

The first page of the survey consisted of demographic questions. I feel that it would be better to put this information at the end of the survey to signal that it was coming to an end and also to keep any "sensitive" questions at the end, so as not to discourage people from completing the survey. (some people may view demographic questions as "sensitive")

Stout's Campus Commuter Survey

Since we didn't quite get to talk about it in class today, I'll post some of Heather and my thoughts on Stout's survey here. If you want to take a look at the survey yourself the title to this is a link to it. The survey is on the last few pages of the document.

One important thing that Stout did was to separate seasonal and non-seasonal commuters. I think we should also find a way to make sure that changes in commuting due to weather are taken into account. Stout may have taken it too far though by also breaking it down to two month periods. While I would love to get that exact, looking at their results brings up some problems. Since this survey will only be answered by a relatively small percentage of students, it is important that we have a large enough random sample to be able to represent the whole campus. I don't remember the exact calculations to find this amount but in some of their questions Stout had less than 50 respondents. We need to make sure we have enough respondents before extrapolating the data to represent the campus as a whole.

Willamette University Campus Commuter Survey

Just a few comments about the Willamette Campus Commuter Survey since we didn't get to it in class.

The survey is extremely short (only 7 questions) which provides both advantages and disadvantages. Having a short survey probably increases the number of people that will be willing to take it, but by severely limiting the number of questions, such as the Willamette survey did, I can’t imagine that the results would be very thorough and conclusive.

One particular aspect of the survey that I thought was good was that they asked for distance from school, days commuting per week, and weeks commuting per year, all separately. I think that this makes the survey easier for the person taking it because, at least in my opinion, it is much easier for to estimate these amounts than to estimate the total number of miles driven for the entire year.

As far as improvements go, it would be nice if they had included a section for suggestions regarding the commuter situation on their campus and also if the survey had differentiated between seasons.

Hej från Sverige!

Greetings CNT 2010! I hope you are all as excited as I was when we began the carbon inventory two years ago. It was certainly an eye opening experience for me, and I am excited to see the improvements your fresh points of view will bring to this iteration of the project. While I am disappointed that I won’t have a chance to be doing any hands on with you, I can’t say I am disappointed to be here in Växjö.

Often called the “The Greenest City in Europe” (a title given to it by the BBC and adopted by over 500 other media organizations), Växjö has been making strides for several years to cut its carbon footprint and become more sustainable. I can see the efforts that are being made all over. However, they are often so well integrated they are not terribly obvious. The first thing that really stuck out to me was all the bikes.

I arrived in the city on a cold snowy night and when I got off the train there were people biking on the main street in the city center, right there with all the cars. The weather here is very similar to Wisconsin and as I am typing right now there are still people biking past me through the snowy campus mall. The bicycle parking on campus is abundant and often covered. Even though nearly all of the University’s 15,000 students live on campus, there are very few parking lots for cars. Walking along the lake into the city center people from youth to retirement age, men and women, all bike past. When I discovered the statistic that, as of 2006, 40 percent of households in Växjö didn’t own cars, I wasn’t too surpised.