Bicycle Austin forum

Zgardner

Member

Registered: 2010-04-05

Posts: 2

Cycling in Austin Survey For UT Senior Thesis

I'm a senior at UT and am conducting a survery about cycling in Austin for my Senior Thesis project. This is a 25 question survey that will take less than 10 minutes to complete and is entirely anonymous, no personal information will be collected. I need to get as many people to take this as possible so as to obrain a decent population sample so that I have good statistics to back up my claims on my paper. I would greatly appreciate it if you would take the time to complete this survey. If you forward the survey to anyone else that you think may be interested in taking it, I would be very grateful.
Thank you.
http://survey.constantcontact.com/surve … z54d/start

Last edited by Zgardner (2010-04-05 18:00:22)

CharlesDuffy

Member

Registered: 2009-07-03

Posts: 56

Re: Cycling in Austin Survey For UT Senior Thesis

The "which of these things would you prefer" question (re bike lanes / separated paths / etc) is going to have results substantially skewed from what people would support when their answer needs to take into account political realities. That is to say -- I would take 100 miles of bike lane over 10 miles of fully separated path, and given the difference in costs and lobbying difficulty to achieve these mile-for-mile, I'm not sure that a "which would you prefer" question which *doesn't* take differences in costs into effect would have a real-world usable result.

I think a much better set of questions for that purpose would include individual items like this:

Do you believe that bicycle facilities (such as striped lanes or dedicated bike paths) are beneficial to cyclists?
[-] Yes.
[-] No.

If you answered Yes to (prior question), how many miles of unwidened, striped bike lane would you be willing to give up for each mile of separated path intended for transportational / commuter use?
[-] Not applicable, I don't like either striped lanes or separate paths.
[-] None, I prefer striped lanes to separate paths.
[-] One mile (both solutions are seen as equal value)
[-] 1.5 miles
[-] 2 miles
[-] 5 miles
[-] 10 miles

...varying the values of A and B (here being "unwidened, striped lane" and "separated path").

The former question is to avoid asking the comparative questions of folks who take the position that use of dedicated facilities is harmful as a whole (ie. by not acclimating motorists to look for cyclists in the road, thus making cycling less safe in areas where such facilities aren't available). Alternately, such responses could just show up as the "Not applicable" result on the comparative answers across the board.