Davis Square Streetscape Survey

[sarahsomerville.livejournal.com]

Dear Davis Square Residents, Business Owners, Visitors, and Fans:

The City is working to improve the Davis Square streetscape and wants your ideas for upgrades that will provide safer, easier travel through the area—whether driving, walking, or cycling—as well as enhance the visual appeal of the square. 

We're gathering input via community meetings and a survey.  The survey is located here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/B3PY9SZ
Paper copies are also available.

We also hope you will join us for our next meeting on August 7th, 6pm at the Tufts Administration Building, 167 Holland Street.  

Please check out the blog entry for more information on what we’ve been working on, and spread the word:

http://somervilleresistat.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-would-you-change-davis-square.html

We look forward to your input!

Comments

[pristinepetals.livejournal.com]

I appreciate what you're trying to do here and applaud your efforts to get input from the community. I would Like to caution you that I don't believe you'll get great data from your survey monkey. Pwrhaps its not to late to make changes? Question 7 is worded poorly .. It's unclear if "good condition" means that the existing conditions are good and need no further improvement or if it means it is important to to me that the conditions are made to be good in the future as opposed to settling for acceptable conditions. A respondent shouldn't have to stop to infer the intent of the question. The question on intersections is also tough. I believe you'd get better information if you allowed respondent to select "I don't know or I'm not sure" rather than forcing them to rank. I was forced into a choice when I really don't know the street names (I know... After 7 years I should know better, but I'm a new englander at my core) and could not simply skip the questions. It's possible other questions could also benefit from a "don't know" response. Sorry to be critical-- but I'd love to see you collecteaningful responses to better influence the decision made.

[hahathor.livejournal.com]

I agree; it's wonderful that you're doing this, and I think you could get more useful information if you tweak the survey. If you are interested, I work professionally as a researcher and survey developer and would be happy to donate my time to making this a more user friendly survey, and one that would get more useful data. I can be reached at my_lj_Name-AT-gmail-DOT-com if you're interested.

[pristinepetals.livejournal.com]

Great suggestion. If the survey is pulled and recoded, I'll happily take it again and recruit others to share their views as well.

[boblothrope.livejournal.com]

Agreed on both points.

Who wrote the survey?

[codeman38.livejournal.com]

On a similar note: if someone doesn't answer walk, bike or drive on question 2, then question 5 should be optional. (I had to fudge it by just putting the streets that my preferred bus route uses...)

Edit: That question is also rather useless for residents of the Square, too. Maybe if it asked about routes to get out...

And the intersections one...yeah, with my sense of direction (or lack thereof), I had to resort to Google Maps to remember which street went with which name.