4.4 Community Survey

28 4.4 COMMUNITY SURVEY

During the clean-up event, we surveyed the participants. We asked a series of questions, involving age, sex, race, mode of transportation, etc. This provided an opportunity to pilot an actual community engagement activity. We worked hard to make the proess inclusive by having a digital survey and a hard copy of the survey on site. Of the 64% of surey respondents that claimed they do not utilize the space, the primary reason they cited for not using it was because they did not know it exsisted. This amounted to a whopping 57% of responses citing this reason. 26% of them claimed that a lack of accessible trasnit was the primary reason they dont use the space.

We found that most of the community would prefer being notified about events and future activities by email or social media. A very small minority of people would prefer in-person meetings as opposed to these methods. This, along with mailers, prooved to be the least popular form of engagement. Lying somewhere inbetween the line of popular and unpopular was texting as a form of engagement - coming in with a score of 13%. From the collected survey results, we found that 50% of participants who arrived at the EarthDay Cleanup event drove to the location. This means that 21 out of the 42 responses indicated driving as a form of arrival. This signifies that driving to the rail trail may serve to be a popular method of transport in the future. Out of the 42 total responses, the second most popular form of transport to the site was biking which amounted to 13 of the 42 (31%) of participants. This was a pleasantly surprising figure - indicating to us that the rail trail seemed to be incentivizing this method of transport. Coming in next was public transit. This method, although ranking third in popularity, ended up showing a significant drop off in users as opposed to driving and biking, This method of transport ended up scoring 5 out of 42 users which amounts to a 12% popularity score. Finally, walking prooved to be the least popular method of arrival at our Earth Day event only coming in at 3 out of 42 users (7%). Our survey suggests that residents like to use the rail trail primarily for enjoying nature and relaxing. This amounts to 40% of the 36% of respondents who do utilize the space. The second most popular reason for using this space was for exersize.