WisDOT Survey Finds Itself Loved...
But in a sampling tilted towards highway operations barely asks about mass transit.
Here's the survey and the results.
WisDOT posted it, here.
And remind me why WisDOT is spending taxpayer money on such things?
3 comments:
Why? Because they can and because we need to know they are doing such a good job! Who knew? Survey responders appear to be least happy with the job that those pesky public employees do at DMV Service Centers. Otherwise, its all good with DOT. Unless of course, you ride a bike or need public transportation.
Based on 30 years of market research experience, I reviewed the WiDOT survey.
Its survey method and portrayal is fundamentally flawed.
By quota, the lower population density areas of the state are oversampled and the high density areas under sampled.
75% of the state’s population lives in 25% of its counties. The construction of the sample ‘areas’ looks political (EG lumping LaCrosse and Madison together).
The results have higher standard error of estimate in the higher population densities because of the under sample and so are ‘blended’ with the over sampled rural areas.
And the study asks very specific questions about urban transportation like availability of public transit and congestion in urban areas. Non sequitur.
The study oddly excludes all 'don’t know’ responses and re-jiggers the data exclude the holes in opinion.
I suspect this is done to pump their agenda because most people don’t sit around thinking about their customer satisfaction with highways or the state patrol.
DMV is another story…people hate it, it is the butt of jokes, and, if someone wanted to, say outsource its function to a private contractor, one way would be to say we’ll have better satisfaction.
Having ‘equal weight’ geographies guarantees low DMV satisfaction due to the fact that rural people have to travel to population centers to visit DMV and then have to wait, something you don’t do a lot of in rural communities.
The study questionnaire leads with the DMV with 7 large queries on DMV, compared to 3 on State Patrol, and 6 on total transportation services (highways…as you noted very little on Transit). The study report leads with 36 pages of data responses on DMV although it is the lowest budgeted ‘product’ of DOT.
State Patrol gets just 6 pages of data responses and 8 pages on highways by comparison. Quite the opposite of funding.
The technical term of art for market research like this is ‘punk polling,’ a term invented by the CIA to describe its propaganda outings.
And why did we the tax payers hire an out of state firm to conduct this research when there are many qualified in state firms who could competently conduct this research?
DOT will say it was for comparability to other DOT’s but why should we benchmark against states with wildly varying priorities?
This poll is a POS that has “agenda” written on it from page one.
Give yourselves a big, asphalt-y hug, too, DOT!
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