Monday, April 11, 2011

Lack of credibility, the Region, and LRT reports

Chair Jim Wideman and Members of Planning and Works Committee have released the long-awaited LRT report, titled Preliminary Preferred Rapid Transit Implementation Option and dated April 12, 2011.

There is no nice way to say this. The report is another example of flagrantly biased and inaccurate public relations hooey from the Region.

The report says, "In evaluating the rapid transit implementation options and considering the recent public input, staff have identified that: Rapid transit is preferred over business-as-usual." "10 per cent [of respondents] prefer business-as-usual."

This is based on public comment sheets that asked residents to choose one of 11 options, where the only non-rapid transit option was described as "not considered feasible."

I used to work as a market research analyst and I have heard a lot of wild stories about biased surveys, but this one takes the cake.

You do a survey in which you instruct people not to choose one of the options, and then you claim the survey proves that they don't want that option.

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4 comments:

Michael D said...

As you wrote, the report says, "In evaluating the rapid transit implementation options and considering the recent public input, staff have identified that: Rapid transit is preferred over business-as-usual." (Emphasis mine.)

"This is based on a survey..."

Huh? You yourself quoted the above piece indicating that it is a staff judgment based on various sources of information, not a strict reading of the provided public input.

Yappa said...

Hi Michael,

Here are some other quotes from the report:

"Staff have identified that rapid transit is preferred over business-as-usual... This is supported by the public response, with 78 per cent of all respondents stating support for rapid transit."

"700 submitted written comments. Of these, 78 per cent stated support for rapid transit."

"Of these 705 respondents, 615 (87 per cent) indicated support for one or more of the options including BRT, LRT or business-as-usual. The preference for the remaining 90 (13 per cent) is other or unknown. Of the 615 respondents who indicated support for LRT, BRT or business-as-usual: 451 (73 per cent) support LRT"

And so on. They are clearly using the hyper-biased survey to claim widespread support for LRT and minimal support for an option other than LRT/BRT.

Michael D said...

It is not a survey, and they are not calling it a survey.

If there actually were large-scale opposition to rapid transit and mistrust of the staff recommendations, one would expect there to be people showing up and indicating their disagreement. But few did. It's not like people don't do that -- they showed up in droves to tell City of Waterloo staff off for their rental licensing by-law recommendation.

What the data certainly make clear is that there are few supporters of BRT. And that there are few people sufficiently against rapid transit that they're willing to actually show up and put it in writing.

Yappa said...

Of course it's a survey. They report the responses to it and call them respondents - that's a survey.

Lots of people showed up to oppose LRT, but the form of the forum cushioned the impact of that. It was just a big PR exercise to try to convince people not to oppose LRT. As to the survey, I met several people who said they are against any form of rapid transit but who chose an option other than BU11 because they thought they weren't allowed to choose it.

Lots of other people who oppose LRT didn't bother to show up because they knew from previous forums what it would be like, and that the region was not honestly seeking public opinion.