VANCOUVER -- Staff from the Vancouver Park Board acknowledged Tuesday night that the survey used to track opinion on the Stanley Park traffic changes was allowing multiple entries from individuals.
The survey, launched on Sept. 1, asks locals for feedback on how their park experience has been impacted by the traffic changes. In April, the park was first closed to vehicle traffic, and cyclists were moved off the seawall due to overcrowding concerns. But in late June, single-lane traffic reopened for drivers, with the other lane still reserved for cyclists.
At a board meeting Tuesday night, the director of planning and park development, Dave Hutch, said there had been more than 10,000 responses to the survey to date. Results of the survey could lead to permanent traffic changes in Stanley Park moving forward.
Park Board Commissioner Dave Demers raised the question of a technical glitch which was allowing individuals to fill out the survey multiple times.
The survey does not collect names or email addresses but asked users for their postal code, heritage and age group.
“Online there has been a lot of chatter about the capacity, the ability of whoever wants to fill out the survey more than once," Demers said.
"I want to see if you can unpack this a bit more, how we go about this, how we factor this in. Firstly, if it’s true that you can fill it out more than once and if so, how we handle this fact.”
Hutch confirmed people were able to make multiple entries, but added that it “is not a new phenomena in self-selecting surveys.”
"We do have a process, this is not new, we’ve seen this type of activity on other surveys, and there is a process through our city civic engagement team to actually track multiple entries on the survey and we will be factoring that in as part of the analysis and a compilation of the result," he said.
