Common use of Focus Groups Clause in Contracts

Focus Groups. The consultant team will host up to four (4) virtual focus groups, with different staff members and elected officials from member communities, on strategies and actions that may be considered in the CSAP. The Toole Design Team will document focus group discussions and identify themes that present regional opportunities for collaboration in a summary memorandum. Consultants will assess and review transportation safety related data for quality and completeness, and will work with the MPO to collect, clean, and consolidate current available data for safety analysis. Consultants anticipate using crash, transportation feature, user, activity, land use, and equity data to identifying key crash patterns, locations with high crash frequency and risks, and systemic risk factors that may contribute to future crashes. Consultants will assess multiple datasets and build a GIS database that consolidates and contextualizes crash data with roadway and land use contexts. Based on the quality and completeness of the data, the project team may use assumptions to fill data gaps. The data assessment results, and any assumptions made, will be documented in a memorandum. The data quality and completeness memorandum will be a key check point for the TSC to agree to data sources to further develop the collection of near miss or hard braking data. Below are the data types consultants will seek to help contextualize crash data and inform a systemic safety analysis. The Iowa Crash Analysis Tool (ICAT) is a robust database of reported crash details, and we will use crash data from the most recent five-year period as the basis for our crash mapping and descriptive crash analysis in Task 3. However, consultants may request to review other crash data sources, such as emergency medical services and redacted police reports as needed to further understand the factors in fatal and serious injury crashes across the region. Roadway features are critical to determining crash risk. By joining transportation features to crash data, our team will be able to perform systemic analysis and identify key emphasis areas. Toole Design anticipates using data available through Iowa DOT’s Road Network portal and other transportation network data made available through the MPO and its local partners (e.g., signal, pedestrian and bicycle facilities, crosswalks, etc.). Similar data will be needed for crash risk assessment on locally controlled roadways. Our team will also incorporate datasets like transit routes and stops from Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority (DART)’s General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) as well as sidewalk and bike facility presence and gaps into the safety analysis. Crash frequency is intrinsically linked to the level of travel by users and exposure by modes and is an important measurement of safety level. The challenge is that the risk of death and serious injury is much higher for vulnerable road users, like bicyclists and pedestrians, when a crash does occur. Bicyclist and pedestrian volumes are a systemically under-reported data source. The Toole Design Team will seek to use a combination of synthetic data (see activity data below) and contextual data (i.e., land uses that typically generate higher pedestrian/bicyclist activity). The Toole Design Team has an existing license for project use of Replica travel modeling, which will be used for this project. Replica is an activity-based and data driven model that creates a synthetic population for multistate regions and then combines ACS data with location-based services data and transaction data to create a roster of all trips by mode and approximate time of day. The benefit of this data source is that, despite being approximate, it would give the MPO universal coverage of vulnerable road user travel for a snapshot in time that can help assess areas where safe system improvements are most needed to shield vulnerable road users in time and space from high forces if a collision with a vehicle were to occur. Land uses are most valuable in determining bicyclist and pedestrian activity near certain development types (e.g. Downtown, multi-use zoned development, parks and recreational areas). The Toole Design Team will incorporate land use data from comprehensive plans and the MPO travel demand model into the crash analysis and provide land use context for crash locations. The project team will use USDOT SS4A equity resources and the MPO’s degrees of disadvantage analysis as the key equity data. Based on the social and demographic vulnerability and degrees of disadvantage analysis, the Toole Design Team will focus on identifying transportation disadvantaged communities and locations.