Streets for People What makes a people-friendly street, and how might we measure that?
Contents 1… Preface 3… Introduction 4… Existing Blueprints for People-Friendly Streets 5… Process 6… Literature Review 7… Criteria 9… Street Evaluations 9… Experiment 12… Summary 13… Appendices (attached) 14… Bibliography
Trey Hahn Final Project Critical Placemaking Fall 2016
Trey Hahn Critical Placemaking Final December 2016
Preface Leading up to this final project, I was interested in the intersection of placemaking and everyday biking. Not only will each play an important role in urban planning in the coming decades, but they also are two seemingly disparate but actually quite linked subjects. Placemaking, although still being defined and currently practiced in different ways, is at the core about making places where people want to be. While there are certainly issues with equity and motives behind work many organizations are labelling placemaking as pointed out in articles Zombie Urbanism and Enough of Bogus “Placemaking” (Aspen, 2016 and Russell, 2015), the idea of planning places for people themselves presents a powerful framework and shift in planning ideology. Going forward, a truly successful placemaking project has to make equity (which has often been neglected in placemaking projects in favor of economic development) a central focus. With that in mind I believe there are three essential components that people working on placemaking must address in their projects: 1. Make a place where people want to be 2. Provide a good quality of life and 3. Ensure equity. Although seemingly unrelated at first glance, widespread, inclusive everyday bicycling can do exactly what is needed for these three components of placemaking. These subjects are in fact on the same team and can be very connected. Cities around the world are now seeing the potential of everyday biking to solve diverse yet connected economic, social, health and environmental issues (Gössling & Choi, 2015). However, there has been a lack of planning for the everyday person on a bicycle. Instead, planners have typically viewed people on bicycles as mini-cars, which has limited the practice of riding a bike to a very small group of people and stalled the potential of everyday biking to solve our pressing contemporary challenges. For example, despite New York City having over 1000 miles of bike facilities (AMNY, 2015), biking is a marginalized activity limited to a small group of people: only about 1-2% of trips in New York City are made by bike, although it is difficult to measure the exact amount (New York City Department of Transportation, City Clock Magazine, and Miller). The small group of people that do brave these trips are forced to go to battle on New York City streets. This case shows that “bike facilities” do not necessarily create a pleasant environment where most people want to be and ride a bike. Figure 1 shows “Class 2 Buffered Bike Lane” that is considered one of the best types of facilities in the city. Despite this high status, in practice few people actually use this “facility”. So while New York City is not having much trouble racking up miles and miles of bike lanes, it cannot seem to make bike facilities that everyday people actually want to use.
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Figure 1: Buffered Bike Lane on Hoyt Avenue North in Astoria, Queens, NYC
Placemaking has huge potential to bridge this gap: the framework of creating places (or in this case, streets) people actually want to be in (in this case, translated to riding a bike on) gets at the gaping holes in the existing bike planning paradigm. The purpose of this preface is to point out that the intersection of placemaking and everyday bicycling holds lots of potential and to encourage further research. When I myself tried to research this though, I realized I was in over my head and that there were too many unknowns. Before diving deep into how to make a place where people want to ride a bicycle, I decided I needed to figure out what makes a people friendly street in general. This is not to diminish the potential of the placemaking for everyday bicycling topic, but to build a more solid foundation for investigating the question and contributing to further work that anyone undertakes. A place where people (on foot) want to be has lots in common with a place where people want to casually ride a bike to get around. By exploring this more foundational question now, in the future we may be able to explore the bicycling one. Accordingly, this project will instead investigate “What makes a people-friendly street?” Upon starting the exploration of this question, I realized that from an urban planning perspective a large part of this question lies in pinpointing and measuring specifics of the street. From this realization, I’m exploring this second related question: “How can you quantify and measure a people-friendly street?”.
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Introduction “What makes a people friendly street?” is a large question that no one person alone can answer. This paper does not hope to definitively answer this question; that is not realistic. What it does hope to do is give a new perspective on it, and in terms of quantifying this abstract concept it hopes to encourage planners to think beyond basic street elements like curb extensions and think about how to more holistically represent the actual experiences people using the street. “How can you quantify and measure a people friendly street?” is in its own right a very complex question. There is no simple answer, and many people (myself included) think that these human, qualitative phenomena are too complex to simplify and assign a rating to. This is a very valid point; this paper alone will not be able to fully quantify these complex phenomena. This project is only biting off a smaller piece of larger questions (Figure 2).
Figure 2: This project is only biting off a small piece of larger, more complex questions.
With that said, this paper does aim to explore how planners can develop more holistic methods to measure people-friendly streets that account for the experiences of the people themselves. These methods, when implemented, have potential to influence decision makers and drive development of more peoplefriendly streets in places outside of the existing qualitative circles in which these ideas gain traction. As many decisions are made based on measurable criteria, people in these existing circles that want people-friendly streets should consider trying to speak decision makers’ language. From my personal perspective interacting with both planning organizations and advocates for more people-friendly streets, I see a need to open up a new door between the two groups and explore how they can work together to make people-friendly places. This is what drives this paper at its core.
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Existing Blueprints for People-Friendly Streets While there are existing “people-first” street design guides, they unfortunately do not usually focus on the actual humans themselves. For example, the NACTO guide (while hailed by Ben Fried on Streetsblog as in the quote below and other sites) is still very based around the parameters of moving traffic, not on making a place that people want to be in. Curb extensions do reduce pedestrian crossing distances and speed humps do slow cars. These are good and an improvement over highway-like streets running all across our cities, but they still frame the discussion around moving cars, not making places where people want to be. “A blueprint for designing 21st century streets, the Guide unveils the toolbox and the tactics cities use to make streets safer, more livable, and more economically vibrant.” -Ben Fried, Streetsblog
A street that checks all of the NACTO guide’s boxes (such as in Figure 3 below) may be nicer than one that doesn’t check the boxes, but it still does not necessarily result in a people-friendly or people-centric street.
Figure 3: These curb extensions from the NACTO guide are certainly beneficial to pedestrians and beautify the street, but they do not constitute an approach that from a higher level puts people at the center. http://nacto.org/publication/urban-street-design-guide/street-design-elements/curb-extensions/gateway/
With that in mind, this paper will explore what elements actually make places for people, not just mitigate impact of cars. Instead of starting with the question “How can we make roads more tolerable for people?”, it will start with “what makes a people friendly place?” This is an attempt to take a bigger picture view and consider things like power relations, a sense of place and quality of life that are most certainly vital elements of a people-friendly street yet are not encompassed in bollards and curb extensions. This is not an attack on the NACTO guide in particular. Compared to other North American Street Design guides, it probably does the best job of considering
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people’s experiences being on the street to a certain extent. What I’m trying to do is shine light on the larger issue of how planners and designers define a people-friendly street. I hope to start a discussion about moving past our existing framework, and actually put people at the center rather them make streets just habitable enough for them to use. Process To move past this existing framework, the first step I took was to conduct a literature review of people with different perspectives to figure out what actually makes a people friendly place. After examining these different perspectives and aggregating main ideas, I had to narrow these down into what I thought were the most critical components of a people-friendly street (see a glimpse of process in Figure 4). Through this, I came up with 5 criteria that I felt had to embody the idea of a people-friendly street.
Figure 4: Handwritten notes from process of surveying literature and developing 5 main criteria.
After these main principles were developed, the next step was to try to figure out how to both practically and accurately measure these criteria that represent principles for people-friendly streets. This step was not easy, and I was not able to find a way to measure each of the 5 criteria in this project. Although it is incomplete, I hope the criteria I was able to develop a method to measure starts a discussion. Hopefully, people with different perspectives and more specific knowledge on one of the criteria can think about how they might be measured and improve on what I’ve begun.
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As stated previously, you cannot fully measure something like power relations on the street- it’s just too complex. However, in order to put it on the agenda at all (and agendas are often limited to what is measurable), we need to begin to pitch these more holistic people-friendly methods so they can influence decision making. After developing methods to measure these abstract criteria, I then began to investigate how to use these criteria to evaluate actual streets. For this paper I was unable to conduct formal evaluations, but I was able to conduct an experiment that looked into how humans perceive streets. This firsthand human perspective is an important check to the research-based methodological criteria I developed. Once the results of this experiment are compared to evaluations of the same streets using the criteria-based methodology, we can see how closely the criteria actually correlate to what real human beings feel about the streets. Literature Review The first step to figure out what makes a people-friendly street is to look at a diverse group of viewpoints to get a holistic perspective on the subject. I surveyed literature about various topics and informally aggregated the ideas as shown in the notes in Figure 4. This included topics that we covered during the course such as Culture and Identity, Uses of Public Space, Methods of Observation, Planning with People, The Right to the City, and Critical Placemaking. and topics that I investigated more independently. In looking at Place Identity, Wheatley and Rawlins gave a look into what makes a place in the children’s book My Place. Proshansky offered a more academic approach in his article “Place-Identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self”. To think about actual behavior and activity on the street, I referenced Zeisel in his articles “Observing Environmental Behavior” and “Observing Physical Traces”. I also took inspiration from Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Gibson’s Theory of Affordances. As motivation for the research question at large, I used a view James Rojas gave in an interview on transportation planning in general: “I would develop a transportation planning process based on the experience of mobility rather than cost, destination or mode. How does it feel to be stuck in traffic, or cross a wide street, or bike on a busy street? This would improve the mobility experience and get us away from planning projects that fall short for the user.” -James Rojas in 2012 interview with Kelly Main
In addition to what we covered in class, I also investigated the work of Jan Gehl and Project for Public Spaces (PPS) on the idea of The Human Scale. Referencing the modern master-planned Brazilian city of Brasília, Gehl had an insightful and humorous point about importance of remembering the human scale: “What is not great in Brasilia is how people are treated. Because nobody thought about that there would be walking and moving about.” [Planners] “never thought about… that there was
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Trey Hahn Critical Placemaking Final December 2016 no money to give [people] all a helicopter so they really could enjoy Brasilia�. -Jan Gehl, TEDxKEA
This different literature and media from inside and outside of class was referenced in choosing the final 5 criteria to represent a people-friendly street. Criteria At the end of the literature review process, I identified 5 main criteria for a people-friendly street: Power Relations, Place Identity + Ownership of Space, Right to the City: Access to Quality of Life, Inclusivity + Diversity, and Human Scale. I then explored how we might begin to concretely measure these criteria, and came up with ideas for 3 of the 5 criteria (Figure 5). I hope these ways of measurement can serve as a starting point for others to add on to.
Figure 5: Criteria and respective possible Ways of Measurement for People-Friendly Streets
Power Relations and Allocation of Space For measuring Power Relations, I settled on Allocation of Space as one way to measure the loaded term. I devised two ways of measuring allocation of space on a given street: the first (see Figure 6 for example) is by getting an aerial image from Google Earth and drawing polygons on top of the image in a software such as Adobe Illustrator. Then, one can calculate the areas of the different polygons- I used a script in Adobe Illustrator to do this. Through some basic math with the total area of polygons for each mode (e.g. people on foot, in cars, on a bike, etc.), it is then possible to figure out how much percent of the street space is allocated to each mode. This method is not precise but it is fast and can give a solid picture of the allocation of space on a street.
The second way I devised is more complex and time consuming, but can provide richer results. Through image analysis in GIS (a Geographic Information Systems platform such as ArcGIS), one can teach the GIS to visually analyze the image and determine how many pixels are dedicated to different uses. You have to develop the uses (classifications) you want to measure ahead of time and teach the GIS through supervised learning how to visually identify the different classifications (e.g. parking, road asphalt, sidewalk, tree beds, bushes, etc.). After the GIS does this analysis and outputs a raster grid with values of the main classification per cell, one can calculate full areas of and figure out what percentage of the street is allocated to each respective use.
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As I haven’t carried this second method out yet due to time limitations, there may be kinks in this method that I’m not aware of. However, it still holds promise for more detailed explorations of street space allocation and may be automatable for other visually similar streets if someone wants to do the analysis on multiple streets in the neighborhood.
Figure 6: Approximate allocation of street space by mode from aerial image in Google Earth
Right to the City and Access to Essential Services To measure people’s “Right to the City”, I wanted to see if it was possible to measure access to a healthy quality of life on the street. To do this, one could use GIS. In short, first the community and/or planner has to first identify what the essential services are; once this list is developed data must be gathered and then a GIS analysis can be done on how many of them exist on or within a given distance of the street. The exact rating system would still need to be developed further; this is just an idea of how one might go about it. Inclusivity and Diversity of Uses Measuring inclusivity and diversity on a street is no easy task. The first hurdle is translating a qualitative subject to quantitative data. One way I thought of doing this is by measuring the diversity of uses on a street. This does not come close to fully encompassing the idea of inclusivity and diversity on a street, but it is a small start.
The best way to get data for this is through physical street observations on the street itself. However, sometimes time is scarce and for that situation Google Maps’ Street View may be able to help. I investigated how accurate it was to use street view to count the number of different uses taking place on a street (like in Figure 7 below). I concluded that about 50% of uses that you would observe in a 20-minute physical observation session will show up in Street View. However, if it’s of a cold winter day or bad weather in which cases you will probably see much less. Just do it for the most active/diverse street in area so you can do a comparison and assign a rating For the full results of my investigation, see Appendix 1.
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Figure 7: Example of identification of different street uses with Google Street View
Next Steps: How to measure “Place Identity + Ownership of Space” and “Human Scale”? The two criteria I didn’t devise a way of measuring were Place Identity + Ownership of Space and Human Scale. For the first criterion, a good question to ask is if place identity is something that can be measured quantitatively at all? Where would we start in trying to measure this? It may be the most important of the 5 criteria for a people friendly place, but I was unable to devise a practical and accurate way to measure it. As stated throughout the paper, I hope others can contribute to answering this question.
Human scale may be easier than Place Identity to measure quantitatively. While I wasn’t able to develop an exact methodology to measure this, it seems like the proportional size of buildings and street to people may be a place to start. Someone with more expertise on this topic may be able to develop a more concrete method for this criterion. Street Evaluations An original goal of the project was to use Astoria as a living laboratory to explore the research questions. However, I was unable to get deep into this during the time constraints of the project. I was able to test out a version of one of the methods for the midterm project, but looking ahead I think the next step is to actually do evaluations of streets to test out the criteria. Experiment While the development of criteria to holistically measure people-friendly streets is a great and ambitious goal, it is not useful if the criteria do not align with what actual humans think and feel. To check the accuracy of the criteria, I did an
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experiment asking real people to describe how they felt about three different streets after watching a short video. Each street’s video was from the perspective of a human standing on and experiencing the street. In shooting the videos, the my goal was to capture the actual embodied experience of a person standing on the street and make the people participating feel like they are there. Each video was approximately 1.5 minutes long and before viewing each video participants were given a short prompt to give context about what they’re doing on the street (e.g. “You’re waiting for a friend who said he/she’d meet you here). After watching a video of each street, participants were asked to describe how they feel on the street. This open ended question was posed immediately after viewing each street, and then at the end of the session the participants were asked more specific and quantitative questions (e.g. “Rate your experience on each street on a scale of 1 to 5” and “Which street would you stay on longest?”). At the end of the experiment participants anonymously handed in their responses, of which you can see a sample in Figure 8 below.
Figure 8: Sample of responses from the experiment
There are several limitations to this experiment. I had a small sample size (8 people) and it was mostly college students (with one college professor). In terms of demographics, it is not fully representative of the general public. However, it does bring a really important human element to my research. As I’m striving to make more holistic methods to measuring that take actual people’s experiences on the street into account, it’s vital that I be in touch with real human beings.
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After the experiment, I typed up the responses and did some word frequency analysis and made word clouds (using wordsift.org) to show what people said most frequently about each of the streets. The results are below in Figure 9.
Figure 9: Word Clouds of most frequently used words describing each street. The first street (at top) is Ditmars Blvd, the second th (middle) is Hoyt Ave N, and the third (directly above, bottom of the 3) is 29 Street.
In addition to the word clouds, I calculated the average ratings for each street and the which street people would prefer to stay on out of the three streets. Results for these are in Figure 10 below.
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Figure 10: Average rating for each street on a scale from 1 to 5, and which street of the 3 that participants would stay on
Overall, the experiment was useful in exploring primary human perspectives on which streets they like most. The original goal of this experiment was to be able to compare the results to an evaluation of how human-friendly streets are using my methodology. Once I strengthen the measurement methods and perform actual street evaluations with the criteria, I would make the comparison as the next step. Summary What makes a people-friendly street and how can you quantify it? This paper explored this massive question and bit off a small piece of it. It is not easy to measure a people friendly place, and this project affirms that notion. However, it is worthwhile to strive to improve existing planning measurement methods to be more holistic and centered around people’s actual experiences on the street, like Rojas has alluded to. I hoped to use Astoria as a living laboratory to explore the research question, and while I didn’t get as deep into it as initially planned, I was able to take important steps with the social experiment. People with different perspectives on each of the criteria have much to offer in refining and developing methods. For the criteria and methods to truly embody and effectively represent principles of a people-friendly place, we need these diverse perspectives. Placemaking is in many ways central to the research question. The three base components of a successful placemaking project posed at the beginning of the paper are all vital to making a people-friendly street: 1. Make a place where people want to be 2. Provide a good quality of life and 3. Ensure equity. While I was unable to evaluate specific streets with the criteria and methods developed due to time constraints, the social experiment of showing people videos of different streets provided a valuable human point of view. When evaluations of actual streets are performed, this human element must be taken into account. We should then re-examine the criteria and refine them to reflect what people actually like in real life.
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Finally, it’s clear that the research question of this paper was large and is still ripe to be explored more. While I didn’t directly explore the intersection of placemaking and everyday bicycling as originally imagined, a stronger theoretical base was developed that will be useful in exploring that subject in the future. Appendices (attached) 1. Google Maps Methods Experiment Documentation
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Bibliography Aspen, Jonny (Interview by Jeremiah Moss). “Zombie Urbanism.” Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2016/08/zombieurbanism.html. Accessed 20 December 2016 City Clock Magazine. “Cycling Mode Share Data for 700 Cities.” http://www.cityclock.org/urban-cycling-mode-share/#.WFmk8KIrKCQ. Accessed 20 December 2016. Fried, Ben. “NACTO Previews a Progressive Design Guide for City Streets.” Streetsblog NYC, http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2012/10/25/nacto-previews-aprogressive-design-guide-for-city-streets/. Accessed 20 December 2016. Gehl, Jan. Cities for People. Island Press, 6 September 2010. Gehl, Jan. “In Search of the Human Scale.” Talk at TEDxKEA. YouTube, uploaded by TEDx Talks, 18 December 2015, https://youtu.be/Cgw9oHDfJ4k?t=10m16s. Accessed 20 December 2016. Gibson, James J. “The Theory of Affordances.” The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Chapter 8. First published in 1979. Gössling, S. and Choi, A.S. “Transport transitions in Copenhagen: Comparing the cost of cars and bicycles.” Ecological Economics, vol 113, 2015, pp. 106-113, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274097090_Transport_transitions_in _Copenhagen_Comparing_the_cost_of_cars_and_bicycles. Accessed 20 December 2016. Harshbarger, Rebecca. “Exclusive: City to reach 1,000 miles of bike lanes on Tuesday.” AMNY, http://www.amny.com/transit/new-york-city-to-reach-1-000-miles-of-bikelanes-on-tuesday-1.10873995. Accessed 20 December 2016. Jacobs, Jane. “The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact.” The Death and Life of Great American Cities, pp. 55-73. Publisher: Vintage; Reissue edition (1 December 1992). Kielgast, Louise (Gehl Architects). “The cities of the future are people-friendly cities.” The Official Website of Denmark, http://denmark.dk/en/greenliving/bicycle-culture/the-cities-of-the-future-are-people-friendly-cities. Accessed 20 December 2016. Main, Kelly (2012) "Outreach in Diverse Communities: A Conversation with James Rojas," Focus, vol 9, iss. 1, article 11, http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/focus/vol9/iss1/11. Accessed 20 December 2016.
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Miller, Stephen. “De Blasio Administration Backtracks From Cycling Mode Share Goal.” Streetsblog, http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2015/04/29/de-blasio-administration-backtracksfrom-cycling-mode-share-goals/. Accessed 20 December 2016. National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO). Urban Street Design Guide. Island Press, 1 October 2013. New York City Department of Transportation. “Cycling In The City.” NYC DOT, http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/cyclinginthecity.shtml. Accessed 20 December 2016. Project for Public Spaces. “A street you go to, not just through: Principles for fostering streets as places.”http://www.pps.org/reference/8-principles-streetsas-places/. Accessed 20 December 2016. Project for Public Spaces. Streets as Places: Using Streets to Rebuild Communities. http://www.pps.org/product/streets-as-places-using-streets-to-rebuildcommunities/. Accessed 20 December 2016. Proshansky, Harold. “Place-Identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self”. Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol 3, iss 1, pp. 57-83. Russell, James. “Enough of Bogus ‘Placemaking’.” http://jamessrussell.net/enough-of-bogus-placemaking/. Accessed 20 December 2016. Wheatley, N and Rawlins, D. My Place. Kane/Miller Book Publishers, 1 October 1994. Zeisel, John. “Observing Environmental Behavior.” Inquiry by Design: Environment/Behavior/Neuroscience in Architecture, Interiors, Landscape, and Planning, pp. 111-136. W. W. Norton, 17 February 2006. Zeisel, John. “Observing Physical Traces.” Inquiry by Design: Environment/Behavior/Neuroscience in Architecture, Interiors, Landscape, and Planning, pp. 89-110. W. W. Norton, 17 February 2006.
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Appendix 1: Google Maps Methods Experiment Documentation CAN GOOGLE MAPS SHOW US DIVERSITY OF ACTIVITY ON A STREET? DESCRIPTION: The goal of this project was to try to explore how we might quantify how “people-friendly” streets are. To do this, methods are needed to gather data. This experiment investigated if by looking at Google Maps one can generally get an idea of how many different uses are occurring on a given street. The strength of this method lies not in its accuracy (viewing a snapshot of the street in Google Maps does not provide the same experience as observing on the site itself), but in its ease of deployment. As I am trying to evaluate dozens of streets all over the neighborhood of Astoria for this project, there is not time to physically visit each one. Therefore, I’m exploring if there’s a method to figure out different street uses that is less time consuming.
PROCEDURE: 1. Determine logistics for site observation (in this case it was in the middle of the day when the weather allows people to be outside) 2. Conduct site observations: identify and describe uses that are seen 3. Organize observations and create groups of uses where sensible 4. Use Google Maps to obtain imagery of the street (note date) 5. Visually search Google Maps image to determine uses 6. Compare list of uses for each street between the actual observation 7. Make conclusions about the effectiveness of the Google Maps imagery method and how results can be applied
SITE OBSERVATIONS: *During the observation it was about 50 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny. Each site was observed for about 20 minutes during the time period of 11:30am-12:30pm on Monday, November 28th 28th Street 1. Walking through 2. Driving through • Cars slow down when UPS man crosses the street – note he seems like an accepted legitimate user of the street, as people actually slowed down for him to do his activity 3. Waiting in the car, loading and unloading car, parking 4. UPS Deliveries • Walking around the street with dolly and packages to deliver 5. Sweeping Leaves 6. Chatting between neighbors
Trey Hahn Fall 2016 Critical Placemaking Final Project
• Stand outside on apartment doorstep and watch talk to someone else • Stopping and chatting spontaneously on sidewalk 7. Animal activity • Squirrel digging through the leaves in the gutter between the sidewalk and parked cars (maybe looking for acorns?) 29th Street 1. Walking through • One man was talking on cellphone while walking with wife • Some crossed street to get to park (and train station?) • Boy was dribbling basketball near park • Someone Walked their Dog • People enter and exit buildings 2. Driving through • Car slowed down a bit where there are potholes (almost like an unplanned speed bump) 3. People get in and out of car, people sit in car 4. Delivering packages 5. Man blowing leaves with noisy leaf blower 6. Bringing trash inside gates 7. Two people wave, chat 8. Animal + Nature Activity • Birds chirping in trees above street • Squirrel running up tree • Acorns dropping from trees Hoyt Ave North between 29st/31st 1. Cars driving through • Honking, more loud trucks than in residential streets 2. Waiting for bus • Standing and sitting, waiting • Boarding and exiting bus 3. Car idles and sits in place 4. Walking through • A few walked by talking to partner/friend • One person walked with dogs 5. Biking on the sidewalk
Trey Hahn Fall 2016 Critical Placemaking Final Project
GOOGLE MAPS COMPARISON: Each street observed was toured in Google Maps’ Street View and each visible use was recorded. Some examples of the uses seen are in the pictures below. 28th Street 1. Walking through 1/7 (14%) Image from February 2013, with snow on the ground
Trey Hahn Fall 2016 Critical Placemaking Final Project
29th Street 1. Caring for plants on front porch 2. Driving through 3. Taking out trash 4. UPS delivery 5. Walking through • Crossing street 5/8 (63%) Images from August 2016, sunny
Trey Hahn Fall 2016 Critical Placemaking Final Project
Hoyt Ave North between 29st/31st 1. Waiting for bus (standing) 2. Driving through 3. Resting and rearranging bag on bench 3/5 (60%) Images from February 2013, with snow on the ground
Trey Hahn Fall 2016 Critical Placemaking Final Project
CONCLUSIONS: After comparing virtual street view tours with physical on-site observations it appears that even with its imperfections, using Google Maps as a tool to determine the exact number of uses on a given street does have some utility. As expected, less activities were observed in the virtual snapshot of time than in the 20-minute physical observation. The weather also seemed to have a role in the number of uses, so that should be considered if one choses to use this method (e.g. this may be a main cause of the discrepancy on 28th street). While it would be useful to have a larger sample size, it seems that Google Maps picks up about half the number of different uses as an in-person observation (noting that changes in weather and time of day may change this). This is not a definite conclusion, but I think it proves worthy enough to be explored further to use to collect data in this project.