It hasn’t been a week since West Hollywood rolled out a highly anticipated survey to gauge whether WeHo residents want to keep the electric rental scooter program going, but the endeavor is already mired in confusion and controversy.
Residents who were promised a scientifically valid survey were surprised to find an online-only poll that seemed geared to produce results in favor of the program. City Council was also less than impressed; Councilmember Lauren Meister said any conclusions drawn from the survey were bound to be “bogus.”
Questions remained even after City Manager David Wilson said a more accurate telephone survey component would be undertaken.
Disabled resident Myra Mikie Friedman, perhaps WeHo’s most avid anti-scooter crusader, shared her e-mail exchange with WeHo Long Range Planning Director Francisco Contreras.
Friedman:
“I took the micro mobility survey on Monday. After taking it, I was very skeptical about it! I thought the questions were inappropriate, I worried about certain parties stuffing the survey, and I highly doubted that the results would be accurate. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since Monday.’s CC meeting! So, out of curiosity, I went back to the weho.org survey site to see if I (or anyone) could respond more than once. And sure enough, they not only let me take the survey again, but they recorded my answers. That is simply not acceptable!!! It is not only flawed, it is deceitful, and you cannot use the results of this so-called survey as it stands now!”
Contreras:
Toole Design, the City’s micromobility consultant, has created an online and printed survey tool to gather public opinion on the dockless micromobility program, with the goal of reaching a statistically valid sample of the West Hollywood population as requested by Council. The survey was developed to be shared in various ways to reach across the diverse West Hollywood community and to reach a sample size to achieve statistically valid results. Residents can respond to the survey in multiple ways:
- In-person: The project team will conduct 3 intercept surveys in-person. Surveys will be conducted in areas with high amounts of residential foot traffic. Print surveys are also available to fill out and submit at City Hall.
- Online: bit.ly/MicromobilityWeHo]bit.ly/MicromobilityWeHo
- Phone : Residents can call 323-848-6401 from 9am-5pm to take the survey via telephone.
Users’ IP addresses are recorded as metadata and tracked when they take the online survey. Multiple submissions through the same IP addresses will be flagged as part of the survey data analysis. The project team can also filter out responses with IP addresses not local to the Southern California region.
In addition, we are supplementing the online survey with an additional random sampling phone survey targeting West Hollywood landlines and cell phone numbers. This methodology and approach are similar to that conducted by the City as part of the 2019 Community Survey. Both results will be presented to Council for consideration.
Friedman:
Thank you so much for getting back with a response to our concerns about the survey. However, the questions that you answered, only lead to more questions for me.
You say that Toole Design, your micro mobility consultant, is helping to formulate the survey.
At the city Council meeting when you were asking for permanence for the scooter program, you were also requesting a $300,000 contract with Toole Design “to help ease the micro- mobility program into permanence.
But I thought that Mayor Shyne had asked you to you put that whole program on pause until
I agree the ‘survey’ is bogus. It strikes me as biased construction and language. Eg. It’s not that the scooters are “clutter.” It’s that the things, randomly dropped and piled everywhere, are dangerous hazards, especially at night and in front of emergency fire exits and sidewalks. And they present serious obstacles. One time I crossed a busy blvd in the crosswalk near Cedars only to find a bunch of scooters dropped on the corner ramps that blocked our access to the sidewalk. As the light changed we were forced into traffic to access the sidewalk. This would have endangered a… Read more »
Your reference to the survey being bogus actually has several other aspects to it. The survey was offered up as a means of procrastinating, not dealing with a concept that was initially flawed. That was evident early on and personally determined after several conversations with Kristin Cook about scooters and public safety. She wasn’t interested in dealing with it as much as passing it on to the next in her position. This is emblematic of many concepts put forth by the City in multiple areas. They lack forethought, hire outside consultants and never have an actual grasp of the city… Read more »
I filled out the survey as well, but in favor of scooters. The questions where not unreasonable, but rather direct and informative to the issue, I really do not see some nefarious plan in motion on this topic, and I do believe the issue is a hot button topic to only a minority of the community. With the previous petition, there were less then 500 signatures agreeing to ban scooters. I don’t think this will result any differently. As far a multi voting, those will get voided out as the real zam pointed out.
Part 4, the last one: IPv4 vs IPv6: There are less than 4.2 billion IPv4 addresses and they are allocated in an extremely inefficient manner. Many are also reserved for special uses. In reality less than 1/4 are used in the way discussed above. This means there clearly aren’t enough to go around. This is why cell phones use shared public IPs and all of the devices in most homes and businesses also share public IPs. This is why there are local IP ranges the most common of which is 192.168.x.x. IPv6 works differently. There are 2^128 or over 34… Read more »
I read all four parts of your comments, and most of it was like you were speaking in a foreign language because I am not technically very savvy! Or, to be honest, I’m not savvy at all. So can you please simplify it for me? All that information you just wrote (thank you for the tutorial, but I just flunked the course!) What are you saying…bottom line??? That these IP’s and VPN’s are beneficial to getting accurate survey numbers or are they detrimental to getting accurate survey numbers?? Are you saying that based on Francisco’s response to my email, the… Read more »
Mikie. Sorry for being rather technical. My day job is in cyber security & I have a PhD in the field. My point is that IP addresses can be zeroed down pretty well for home and business if you know where & how to look. If someone is connecting from a VPN, you can tell. With an internet survey, a good firm can use the IP as well as other data to get a pretty good idea as to your location. These multiple data can be checked for consistency and accuracy. They can easily weed out almost all bots and… Read more »
Mikie, a person with a PhD in a field would attach their name to their commentary. Absent that intellectual honesty the commentary presented can (should) be presumed to be spin and manipulation on the part of the scooter companies and their enablers on council and staff. Comments ensconced in anonymity are complete bullpucky.
Part 3: Others: Bigger customers often have reverse DNS entries that they control or that identity them specifically. Business customers can usually request this with a static IP service, but there are obvious privacy implications here. I’m pretty sure they city’s IPs are setup this way, but I don’t know for sure. Cloud services either have client managed reverse dns entries or entries that ID the data center. Irrespective of this, you can always tell the purpose and location to at least the data center level. VPN: VPN services usually use cloud service hosts or operate in the same way.… Read more »
Part 2 Identifying an IP: Almost all IP addresses have a “reverse DNS” entry that identifies the owner of the IP and its use. The general location can also be identified from here. The IP of a VPN will clearly be labeled as such. IPs lacking this entry are considered suspect and get blocked or limited by many services. Different types of ISPs allocate and identify their IPs differently. And that’s the next topic… Cable Companies: IP addresses are assigned in sequential blocks at the node level. Nodes are the boxes located every few blocks. Strictly speaking, the identity of… Read more »
I think everyone needs a primer on how IPs work and are assigned.
Identifying an IP:
Almost all IP addresses have a “reverse DNS” entry that identifies the owner of the IP and its use. The general location can also be identified from here. The IP of a VPN will clearly be labeled as such. IPs lacking this entry are considered suspect and get blocked or limited by many services. Different types of ISPs allocate and identify their IPs differently. And that’s the next topic…
Week effort only to pacify Mikies efforts with an end to the story that goes…..Most people want them, but we listened to you, cause we listen, we we gave you the survey we said we would give you, now please leave us alone and let us continue to do what we want.
I filled it out as well – to ban them in weho. It seems the scooter companies really did a number on the City and us.
I want to thank Mikie Friedman for leading the charge and being an amazing community member.
-n.
I carry spray glue to cover the scooter seat every time I see one. It’s a pearl white color in honor of Dr Pearl Erickson with a masculine scent as a tribute to Mayor Shine. It’s great fun when I see a row of scooters and I can spray 10 seats at a time. Then I take a selfie with the scooter in the background and watching riders get stuck on the seat. I’m so glad West Hollywood is such a safe and walkable city. So much fun. A delightful BBB ambassador girl always laughs when she sees me to… Read more »
LOL
Hopefully you’re joking but either way- this is so trashy.
It’s satirical humor. Not exactly a joke. Hut if that’s the way you see it… the obvious punch line in everything that stinks about West Hollywood is Mayor Shyne, Dr Pearl Erickson and Chelsea (Valley girl accen) Byers. Three of the most dreadful and boring dreary people ever elected to public office. And that’s a fact not a joke.
Doesn’t it have to be funny to qualify as a joke?
There was nothing humorous, though.
Try to think of something more clever next time, MG on Havenhurst 😉
The scooters are a nuisance. Why is this pushed on the residents???
They were in our presence a while back and the prior CC got rid of them. It was the Ayatollah who brought them back. She is the anti-Felix the Cat. Whenever she gets in a fix, she reaches into her bag of tricks. Or should I call it a “trick bag”. She apparently loved the scooters, and back they came. Has anyone ever seen her on one? Where is the DSV? Oh, never heard of it? Department of Sidewalk Vehicles. Never thought of it? Well if the scooters came with a qualifying exam that made them a friendly method of… Read more »
I just took the online survey for the 3rd time from the same device and location. No More Bad Scooters!
The so-called “survey” as designed is a total scam to get the results favored by the scooter companies and their enablers on council and on staff. The survey is neither scientific nor statistical (a word used by Sepi Shyne that means absolutely nothing in this context). It is a waste of dollars and staff time. A proper listening tour of actual residents will yield a believable narrative that should inform policy making. Instead, the entire bureaucracy, starting with the city manager, is trying to sell us (the residents) a bogus bill of goods.
Thanks for your always thoughtful comments, Alan. A small minority of people ride scooters. Seems a true vote would certainly be against them.
The crazy thing seems to be that the City loses out every which way. Revenue goes to the scooter companies in the original bad deals and now this bogus survey costs the city only having to do another survey in an attempt to gain credible information. What a racket!
Again Alan, we seem to be using the same little gray cells.