On PARK(ing) Day (Friday, Sept 21, 2012), we set up an all-day installation and asked both users and nearby merchants what they thought. This being Los Altos' first time participating in the annual international PARK(ing) Day celebration, we wanted to collect as much feedback as possible about whether people liked the installation and the idea behind it, which is to improve the vitality of downtown areas by creating public gathering spaces. So, we created two online feedback surveys, for which people were given the urls so they could fill them out on their own time. One survey was geared towards users of the installation (i.e. those who sat, parked their bikes, made chalk or magnet art, ate/drank/conversed in the space), and the other was geared toward the merchants on both sides of that State Street block. Though we weren't able to get a full foot traffic count throughout the day (we miss our interns!), we guesstimate that over 300 people passed through the installation over the course of the day, based on the 300-attendee count of the 359 State Street World Bike Relief event that same evening. Forty-seven people filled out the user survey, and six merchants filled out the merchant survey. Not bad for survey response rates...

Here are the results of the user survey: