I-Like-To-Bike

But vague impressions and fantasies are so much more imaginative! Anything is possible, everything is real in dreamland.

tandempower

I'm sorry you dislike my criticisms of statistics. I'm afraid that I can think of too many ways to question the counting methods that generate statistical data sets in the first place to really trust the results. Statistics can sometimes stimulate further research, but honestly I prefer to just ask people their impressions based on experience. I trust what someone perceives from living in or visiting an areas more than I trust the impression I would form from reading statistical research.

When I did research in a university, statistical data was hard to come by and often cost money. Even then, it was hard to find data that really addressed the issues you were interested in. If you like reading statistics about this topic and forming impressions from them, please don't hesitate to voice your thoughts on this thread. Just because it's not my favored method doesn't mean I'm not interested in listening to people who do like to think this way, although I do expect intellectual honesty with regard to what is known vs. what remains unknown, which is by necessity a low ratio where statistical data is the basis for knowledge.

There are too many factors to compare cities without knowing them intimately. I know the other side of town where I live somewhat well but I couldn't tell you what most people are doing out on the roads there and I wouldn't trust statistics to provide a sufficiently clear picture either. Survey reporting is always problematic in various ways.

Good point about paying attention to the agenda behind a publication. I'm sorry that statistics don't appeal to me the way they do to you. I wrote some papers using them when I was younger but I just don't view them as a mature form of research anymore. I know some people view them as the ONLY mature form of research, though, so I don't expect you to understand my point of view.

Machka 

Yes!

And it is so much easier to type a long post criticising the use of statistics and real data than it is to do some research and produce any.

Plus ... researching, analysing and producing real data might be too scary. It might challenge and possibly even shatter the vague impressions and fantasies of dreamland.

TransitBiker

Woah, like dude, totally maaannn. O.O

- Andy

tandempower

Machka, you are dense when it comes to understanding the intellectual weakness of statistical analyses. Show me any statistics-based analysis, and I will show you its explanatory weaknesses.

That's actually very true about statistics. Knowledge of statistical averages and norms influence minds at the individual level. Instead of choosing actions based on independent processes of reasoning, people make assumptions about what's good and right based on what's normal. Conformity is a huge social problem; and it is essentially a problem of statistics, even though subjectively perceived norms don't necessarily reflect statistical analyses of actual samples.

Machka 

Again ... so very easy to criticise and call people names. I bet it just took you a second or two to type that. Much easier to do that rather than to do research.


How about putting in some real work for a change. Do some research. Include statistics. Include whatever other information you find.

Answer your own question: "How Much Do Mixed-Use Developments Reduce Driving?" Show us some studies, some findings, some conclusions made by those who have researched that question. Provide us with a professional review of what you find with your own conclusions.

And if you don't know what I'm talking about ... take a class. Learn how to do this stuff.

FBinNY 

In a way the ultimate mixed use development is New York City, or any dense urban core. It's a matter of distance and convenience. When density is high enough you can have services in very close proximity to residences and there's enough population to support them. So New Yorkers (proxy for urbanites) walk to the grocery store, laundromat, restaurant/fast food joint, and other retail establishments and with good mass tansit have a good selection of jobs close at hand. Where walking/mass transit are impractical like furniture, there's delivery services (often free).

For mixed use communities to replace cars, there has to be enough density to put many services close at hand, while giving those business a decent customer base. No matter how one might try, that becomes difficult in single family housing. There's also the question of jobs. Without good density, the job selection close to home will be limited, as may be the residential choices close to work.

Many communities are also built on a walled model without walls. There's a bunch of homes in a pocket with a single, or maybe 2 roads in and out from the outside world. The "business area, may likewise be close but still isolated, so every errand entails moving along the main road for some distance. Where I live some of the older (non-mixed) areas are laid out similarly, so one may have travel a long circular route to get to a house 100 yards away, but in the neighboring close.

Some of the older areas here, that were laid out before the age of the soccer moms, are the same, but they cut pedestrian shortcuts so that children could walk to school without going around. It's an idea so simple, but seems to have gone out of style in the late fifties.

IMO- the goal shouldn't be to eliminate cars, just to reduce the number of car trips, and hopefully eliminate 2nd cars. I can't see mom being willing to walk or bike for the big supermarket run, but maybe with good layout she can send the kids for smaller errands or even do them herself on foot or bike.

Dahon.Steve

Living in a mixed use development is expensive due to the high taxes. It's not smart to live in these communities if you're going to own multiple cars. I live in a community like this and there is no way I can afford to do this with the high property taxes I'm paying. All my neighbors own cars. Go figure.

Machka 

+1 on reducing the number of car trips, not eliminating cars.


Small towns can also be mixed use developments. The small town we lived in (middle of nowhere, Victoria) had just about everything we needed, including our jobs. We were able to reduce our motor vehicle trips ... and instead, walked and cycled most of the time. Many other town residents walked to get places, run their errands, etc. (people are always going to walk more than cycle to get around) ... but all or just about all of us had motor vehicles.

Most of the suburbs I've lived in have also been mixed use developments. I couldn't have been car-free for several years in Winnipeg otherwise. But as it was I had most of what I needed within easy walking or cycling distance, and just about everything else within a doable public transportation distance.


[HR][/HR]
All these places exist ... but how much do they reduce driving? Very hard to say in quantifiable numbers as requested by the title of this thread ... "how much". The request in this thread is for a count ... percentages ...

But how do you calculate "how much"? The little town I mentioned has always been a multi-use development. That's how little towns develop ... shops, churches, houses, etc.. So there is nothing to compare it with. There's no before and after. Same with the suburbs I've lived in ... they developed that way. You could try to compare a multi-use development suburb with one that isn't ... but that comparison won't necessarily be accurate either. I suppose that the best a person (i.e. tandempower) could do would be to find a suburb somewhere that was not a multi-use development and now is, and then analyse the differences.


And the trouble with impressions is that they are so subjective.

If a person went to Winnipeg in January, as their one and only venture into Canada, their impression would be that Canada is a tremendously cold place. In fact, I hear that all the time ... as soon as people find out I'm from Canada, they figure that I have spent the last 40-something years rugged up in parka and boots, freezing my butt off alll the time. "I don't know how you did it" they tell me. And then they are very surprised to discover that the summers in Winnipeg can be longer and hotter than here ... or at least very comparable. They tell me that they have trouble getting their heads around the idea of Canada as a hot place. It is when you pull out the weather statistics that you discover the range of temperatures in Canada and that the impression that Canada is always cold is not accurate.

Same with traffic ... it all depends when you're there. If you always cycle at a certain time of day, your impression of the traffic may be quite different from someone who cycles at a different time of day. How much traffic is there? It's not until someone gets out there and starts gathering data at different times of day and different days of the week that we can find out.





The suburb where we currently live is like that ... all sorts of pedestrian shortcuts all over the place. Same with other suburbs around. It's nice.

Margate, for example, is a nearby multi-use development (small town) and if you look at the attached image from Google, all the thicker white lines are roads, but the thin grey lines are connecting walking paths. They are all or mostly gravel, sometimes even single-track style. You have to look closely to see some of them, like the little connector path between Incana Rd and Jacaranda Dr.

tandempower

I am doing research by posting this thread. It's like having an open focus group on the topic. Your contribution to the focus group is to promote statistics. Thank you for your contribution. Now if you would like to go do a survey and get statistics on how many people favor statistics as a basis for knowledge, that's up to you.

Machka 

You are taking a class, aren't you? You're trying to get ideas for your homework projects???

Apparently Survey Monkey is all right for setting up basic surveys. That might be an option for you too.


As for me, my course isn't about city planning or statistics, so I think I'd rather focus on more applicable topics. Thanks anyway.


Incidentally, what exactly are you researching? If it is multi-use developments, you might start by defining what a multi-use development is. I think each of us may have a different idea. But you'll have to tell us what you're talking about.

tandempower

No, I'm watching a new surge of development-urgency that is being justified by the idea that mixed-use areas will prevent people from driving (as much). So I'm probing to see if there are people on this forum who live in or near such mixed use areas to find out if they and/or others in such areas drive less and why/how.

Often I click a link to a news article only to get confronted by a survey question that blocks the article text until I answer it. I close the article and look for another article that doesn't have conditional access. It's bad enough to be called on the phone by survey-questioners. Now they're trying to accost us on the internet too. We need better social scientists who have the capacity to study human life without surveys and statistics. There are better methods. Read Max Weber. Think about what statistical data is really telling you and what it isn't. Think about what confidence levels would provide you with sufficient information to think robustly about the research topic. You may find that statistics are less important than understanding cultural dynamics and economic interactions.

I just thought you might get more out of studying the statistics about how many people value statistical knowledge instead of assuming it and pestering me about using them.

Defining parameters fragments the topic. Better to operationalize them as whatever people are referring to when talking about them. Then, if some information provided by someone raises the question of what kind of development they are referring to, exactly, you can ask pertinent questions, such as distances between homes and businesses, layouts, etc.

A clear picture will emerge through discussion if you pursue it.

tandempower

What should be eliminated is the need for a car and the demand for driving. Buying/renting a car should be an option for some people, which is stimulated by preference and not a sense of necessity or compulsion, whether that compulsion is social/cultural, geographical, economic, or otherwise.

Presumably the purpose of the motor vehicles was to drive around the larger region. If many such developments exist within a region, there's going to be a lot of regional driving and a need for parking at businesses. People are going to mostly to drive to work if there's no transit and commuting by bike is too time-consuming. Plus, as population/economic growth occur, the area(s) are going to fill in with more housing, more businesses, and more traffic.

Even very car-centric areas are 'mixed use' in the sense that there are convenient stores and maybe some strip-malls within a couple miles, at least. This doesn't mean they're going to be very bikable in terms of running errands and making money without driving.

The actual percentages are less important than the actual reasons people make the choices they do. The question is why people are biking/walking or using transit when they are and why they are driving when they are driving. Learning the reasons people choose one mode or another for various trips gives you an understanding of the lived geography of the area. What is possible emerges from the choices of a few pioneers. When the pioneer culture doesn't expand, it's worth asking what is blocking others from following suit. It there a social stigma to traveling without driving? Are their other factors that dissuade non-automotive travel.

I'm asking for people who have watched mixed-use developments go up to report whether they think these developments have reduced driving. It's that simple.

That's why you take them with a grain of salt and think through what else could be going outside of people's subjective impressions.

You are talking to assumptive people who form homogeneity-images of a simplified world and then express surprise when people's actual experiences of the world don't conform to their simplified mental images. Tell them they won't understand anyplace until they live there long enough to call it their home. Once they have more than one home, they will be better equipped to synthesize the answers to their questions about places they haven't lived in yet.

Or you just ask people what time(s) of day they are out on the roads and if they know what the roads are like at other times.

B. Carfree

I briefly lived and worked in Lubbock, TX. It had a very large number of these short-cuts. I lived eight miles from work and only had to come out onto the grid for a few blocks (to get past their "Beltline" freeway that didn't have any other way under/over). The city is laid out as a grid with every tenth road or so a major road (seven to nine lanes) and the enclosed squares don't have any through roads for cars (pedestrians and cyclists can go through on the short-cuts). All the motorists were crowded onto the big roads while I happily pedalled along serene quiet residential streets, stopping every ten blocks or so to cross one of those beasts.

+1 on reducing car trips and eliminating second cars. The difference between the upper-middle class suburbs I have lived in and the semi-impoverished city I currently reside in is that in the wealthier suburbs, people go to work in the morning and return in the evening; the streets are pleasant most of the day. In this city, most people drive home several times throughout the day. It seems so weird to me, but I think it happens because it is such a small city that it doesn't take very long to go home if one has an hour or two free, so people do it.

Machka 

It is.

I take it you've never lived in small towns.




So your definition of mixed-use developments excludes centres of cities, small towns, and suburbs that have developed naturally as mixed-use developments over many decades.

Since you are asking whether the developments have reduced driving, you are also excluding new mixed-use developments since there was nothing in existence before to compare them with to determine increased or reduced driving.

You just want areas which weren't mixed-use development ... but have become mixed-use development recently.

Machka 

We've established that you are looking at one specific type of mixed-use development ... but you are aware that people have been living in mixed-use developments for centuries, right?



Given that I and an office full of coworkers are employed full time working with databases full of statistics ... and give that we are just one department in an organisation that has many departments each with their own office full of staff working with statistics ... and given that this is just one organisation in a world full of similar organisations ...

I don't need to do a study about whether or not people value statistical knowledge. I know for a fact that people value statistical knowledge.

But not just statistical knowledge. That is often a starting point ... also research.

bragi

Jeez, Machka, quit trying to inject something that resembles reason into the discussion....

Machka 

Sorry ... sorry ... what on earth was I thinking!?

tandempower

That's assumptive and, if people think they're not driven to drive by compulsion, they may not have tried to live car-free yet.

That depends on how to define 'small town' and 'lived.' It really doesn't matter, though. What matters is the point you're trying to make about living in small towns without regard to me in relation to them.

Not necessarily. All I'm really interested in is how the mix of business and residential in a local area reduces driving. Ultimately, I am especially interested in areas where driving has become hypernormalized as transportation and whether planned mixed-use developments are reversing the hypernormalization trend and why/how.

Where did the people who move there live before they moved there? Was driving hypernormalized in their areas and peer/social groups. Did the norm of driving for most/all trips change when they moved to the (new) mixed-use development? You're thinking too much in abstractions and not enough in concrete terms.

I want to understand whether and how the planning and development of mixed-use areas intervenes in the culture of hypernormalized driving. I want to know whether money spent on developing such areas will indeed reduce driving and promote other modes of transportation or whether it's just more money spent stimulating the automotive economy.

Yes. Why would I want to ask whether people in small Dutch towns are walking, biking, and using transit. Those modes are all available for them whether they choose to drive or not. There are no social-cultural stigmas attached to biking or taking a bus, train, or tram. You can't derive information from the way they live to apply to areas and people where these infrastructural facilities and other aspects of the transportation modes are not in place. People who don't live in Dutch cities and towns don't want to hear how people are living in them if they don't identify with them. People are (sadly) nationalistic and usually fail to identify with cities where a different national flag is flying overhead. Best to leave statistical (and other) comparisons out of the discussion and focus on places where people have transitioned from more driving-oriented lifestyles toward more multi-modal living or otherwise leave the car parked more often. This is the only hope for reducing driving in areas where driving has become hypernormalized.

Sounds like convenience sampling.

With what confidence level? P = ?

Like I said, show me any statistical information and I will show you its shortcomings. Statistics are really just a way of presenting a topic in a way that stimulates the broader social imagination of the reader. They are weak, superficial depictions of an abstracted social model that, at best, provides a starting point for gaining good knowledge and, at worst, creates a distraction from valid sociological thinking.


You can reason about statistics but statistics are not a form of reason.

I-Like-To-Bike

"Hypernormalized"?

Machka 

All of which can be found through statistical research ... likely existing statistical research.

As I said before ... do the research. Do some digging and come up with the studies that have been done. Find out the answers to your questions.

And post those studies here in the LCF forum ... those studies might make for some interesting discussion.

tandempower

I keep telling you that statistics don't do it for me. I'm looking for individual case studies. Doing statistical research gets on my nerves. Sorting through data sets is a pain. Percentages are meaningless. Who cares what percentage of people moved to an area from one place or another? The only thing that's interesting is in what way the move was meaningful. Two people could move between the same two cities and have totally different experiences of cultural change. Statistics can't capture that.

I-Like-To-Bike

How can anyone even guess how much driving has been reduced (or increased) by any plan or development without any idea of the numbers involved, other than imagining or fabricating whatever outcome is desired?

jon c. 

Nothing wrong with that if your goal is merely to form or evaluate your own feelings and beliefs. However, if you want research that is of any practical value, you need data. Statistics if you will. If you hope to spur others to take any action, really to convince much of anyone of much of anything, you need hard data.

bragi

You're right: statistics are not, in and of themselves, a form of reason. But that's not what Machka, or anyone else, is suggesting. Rather, she and others are suggesting that maybe it's a good idea to look at available information in an organized way (you know, statistics), come up with an idea of what's going on, and then to take a look at other data that you or others have collected to see if you're right. My experience has been that this approach to solving big problems is vastly superior to having an agenda based on personal preferences or ideology and then totally ignoring or dismissing any information or ideas that do not serve the agenda.