Please spend some time observing peoples’ behaviors relating to your domain or area of opportunity that you’d like to use as the focus on. You’ll be designing of a PRODUCT that supports or promotes sustainable behaviors and practices for INDIVIDUALS in day-to-day use.
Please share your initial observations in a few paragraphs below…
The domain that I’d like to focus on is….
Transportation, whether it focuses on specific modes of transportation or infrastructure.
These are some observations about peoples’ behaviors in this domain…
For my observations, I mainly looked at the primary modes of transport on campus, especially when it relates to temperature and weather conditions. For the most part, people on campus tend to walk, bike, skate, scooter, or take the Marguerite - while most bikes and skates are non-electric, most scooters are electric. Walkers and bikers predominate the majority of intra-campus transportation, with skateboards, scooters, and the occasional roller skater being part of a small minority. We do have Campus Drive and many roads that diffuse throughout campus, but the lack of universal parking (our residential permits prevent us from parking far from our dorms) prevents people from using cars to commute to class. Most car traffic stems from people leaving campus or commuting from elsewhere to campus.
It rained for most of the day yesterday and it’s been especially cold today. In both cases, I saw the amount of people biking drop while the amount of walkers increase. It seemed that this effect was more exaggerated in rainy conditions more so than today’s cold conditions. Thinking about why this is, a likely explanation is that people don’t want to get wet or feel cold. It’s very difficult to bike with an umbrella (since you’re running into the raindrops as you bike) and the increased speed induces a wind chill, especially on your hands.
There isn’t anything wrong with walking instead of biking, but this is true only if it was practical to walk to places off campus. Our CalTrain station and downtown Palo Alto are roughly 40 minutes away (versus a 10-15 minute bike ride). At the same time, it seems that many people don’t like biking to the station because of a perceived high incidence of thefts. Two solutions could be to either encourage walking and expand the Marguerite system or encouraging cycling by reducing the effects of wind chill and improving on bike parking infrastructure.