Solving Saulter — Survey Data

Last week, we asked the question: “What is the purpose of Saulter Road?”, and today, we are publishing the survey responses. Long story short, said two different ways:

• the proximity a person lives near or uses the road determines how the person perceives the intended usage of the road
• no one else cares about your street the way you care about your street

It’s my hypothesis that these statements can be applied to any street in any city, not just Saulter Road. For a additional thoughts on why that matters, check out “Homewood Streets are worth fighting for.”

I’ll talk about how we arrived at the values on this chart in a moment, but I wanted to show it for the folks who read headlines without reading the text.

Duh?!? Right? But, this is important, because people argue about solutions without understanding the counter-party’s perspective and assumptions.

Which votes matter most?

This isn’t just an issue with Saulter, but the question of which perspective matters most when constructing roads?

• The street’s direct residents live in a house 24/7/365 — do they have more sway than non-direct residents? The residents of the street are trying to seek fulfillment and self-actualization and live out a quality of their life.
• In the case of Saulter, far more people live in neighborhoods around Saulter and in Homewood than directly on Saulter. Because they number higher, should they have more votes on a street’s usage? Does the street have more value to the higher collective count than the direct residents?
• Do the response of non-Homewood residents matter at all? Would it matter more if respondent spent $500 / year in Homewood at restaurants and stores? Would it matter less if the respondent neither lived nor shopped in Homewood?

I’m thankful I don’t have to answer these questions, these are all questions that cannot be answered with our data — but they are things to be considered.

To the data! Raw & descriptive

For the raw data, click here.

The deeper findings!

As we said earlier: the proximity a person lives near or uses the road determines how the person perceives the intended usage of the road. We weighted the different responses of speed on a scale of 1 to 4. This created a spectrum of use case based on perceived vehicle speed with the following scores:

1. Saulter is a neighborhood street
2. Saulter is an outlet street for neighborhoods
3. Saulter is a low-speed cross-city thoroughfare
4. Sautler is a medium speed cross-city thoroughfare

The spectrum looked like this:

Then, we applied the numerical value to the responses and averaged the values based on other attributes in the survey:

Where people fell on the speed spectrum:

• Living on Saulter averaged 1.36
• Live In a neighborhood connecting to Saulter averaged 2.45
• In Homewood and away from Saulter averaged 2.71
• Not in Homewood averaged 2.80

We did the same thing for how people reported using the road:

The averages are lower on road usage because people could select multiple choices (people can use the road in multiple ways, but they can only live in one place). Thus, people who lived near the road are more likely to use the road in multiple ways. As described above, those people who lived closer to the road were more likely to advocate it as a Neighborhood street. Thus, the averages are pulled lower based on the structure of the survey.

The speed spectrum averages are:

• Living on Saulter averaged 1.41
• Pedestrian on Saulter averaged 1.83
• Drive on Sautler averaged 2.44
• Stay away from Saulter averaged 2.13

I found that last bit the most interesting — people who stayed away from Saulter had a perspective that the road should be slower than the average of all responses who selected drive on Saulter. My assumption is that people who stay away from Saulter recognize it as a neighborhood street, and chose other driving routes.

Stats Disclaimer

No statisticians were harmed in the creation or inferences of this data — however, they probably had their feelings hurt. The data was collected via a Facebook survey targeted at residents of Homewood, AL in the United States. The data may or may not be valid, but it was not tampered or cleaned for publishing — there was no data cleaning although a small number of responses appeared to be duplicates.

The original survey can be seen here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdKq2htf7q60vgztuMhjTqN2zfANnUXIySkvoFsI85NyUifqg/viewform#responses

The raw responses can be seen here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sMQ3M6IwhqW-dMVHYS6PPIswKxUCiETyD_zTJF1A8Rs/pubhtml?gid=209850634&single=true

The descriptive stats were generated on 4/22/2017 at 8:30 and the survey remained open afterwards.

Thank you for reading. Cheers.