To the Editor:
When we were surprised by the Bike Share station on S. Royal Street and asked the city why proper outreach and permitting was not followed, it came to my attention what a poor job that some city staff does disseminating data and information to City Council, committees and commissions. This means that these entities are not making decisions affecting our neighborhoods and businesses based on comprehensive facts and knowledge of the situations being presented.
The examples I am going to give are related to Bike Share, but I am not trying to discuss the merits or problems with the program. But rather how the city staff appears to be presenting less than accurate statistics. While these examples are small, they should exemplify that the larger problem is staff presenting misinformation.
In several memos T&ES staff stated: “Capital Bike Share has been very popular with residents and visitors to Alexandria, with over 105,000 trips departing from Alexandria stations since the program began, and 17,600 members in Alexandria.” This is a misleading statement and statistically worthless metrics. These are cumulative numbers over the life of the program. The life of the program is not an analytical measurement. The 17,600 comes from whenever Alexandria installed the first Bike Share station until present. This means “members” may have been counted multiple times (I have to say I was surprised that no one on council said wow that means over 10 percent of our city’s population are members, that does not make sense).
And of the 17,600 “members,” 14,044 are one-day members. A more relevant number would have been the number of current members or even better a graph showing current members over time.
The T&ES staff often refers to a wiki online survey when discussing how they gathered community input about bicycling and pedestrian activities. This survey was not sent out on the city’s general email list, but only
to a list of residents they think would be interested. The survey was designed by Toole Design, which admitted the survey results were not statistically meaningful. Only 540 people responded with very little response from residents of the "West End." Over 85 percent of the respondents claimed to be Caucasian, 99.2 percent English speaking and 71.4 percent having a household income in excess of $100,000. Meaningless bar and pie graphs have been produced for the public and for other city commissions from the survey results without a note that the survey lacked adequate representation from lower income, minority, disabled and diverse geographic areas of the city. And city staff continues to cite this as a prime reason for its decisions about bike stations and bike lanes while refusing to talk to the relevant civic associations in the affected neighborhoods.
Assuming the city staff genuinely wants the best outcomes for Alexandria and its residents, it's critical that all departments that create and disseminate data ensure that data are reliable and valid and most of all accurately reflect the topic under discussion. The BikeShare program should be the starting point for doing so.
Ayne Furman
Alexandria