City of Morgan Hill Bikeways, Trails, Parks and Recreation Master Plan

INTERACTIVE MAP SUMMARY January 2015

Introduction

This document summarizes the results of the online interactive mapping questionnaire implemented by MIG for the City of Morgan Hill. The mapping exercise offered a unique way for community members to participate in the creation of the Morgan Hill Bikeways, Trails, Parks and Recreation Master Plan – residents could access this questionnaire online and on their mobile devices at their leisure. The results of this questionnaire, summarized and analyzed in this document, provide insight into how people use the existing bikeways, trails, parks and recreation system in and around Morgan Hill. There were approximately 400 participants. TOOL DESCRIPTION The interactive map questionnaire, Mapita, is a web-based application developed by an offshoot of a research group at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Mapita was developed as a tool to examine the quality of built environments and gather ideas for improvements. Following extensive testing of the technology and methodology, Mapita partnered with MIG to make this tool available for community engagement processes in North America. USE OF RESULTS The questionnaire was designed to gather a sample of the community’s use of the parks, trails and bikeways and recreation system, and existing challenges and opportunities. The results are user- and place-specific. The questionnaire focused on parks and trails for which there is presently limited data available to understand patterns of use. Specifically, the CRC and Aquatic Center were excluded from this questionnaire because data about these facilities is available from the facility operators. Furthermore, because of their high levels of use, these facilities would have dominated the responses and detracted from park usage data. While some questions in this interactive map tool are formatted as traditional questionnaire questions, this is not intended to be a representative sampling of opinions across the community. The primary use of these responses will be as input for further analysis of the park system. Ideas and opportunities uncovered in this effort will make their way into recommendations for park sites or the entire system. These recommendations will be evaluated by the community later in the process.