Ethnography Results: Week 1

For the first week, we sat at a four way stop and made note of every traffic violation that occurred. We noted the vehicle type (car, truck, van, etc...), the color of the vehicle, gender of driver, and what violation occurred (drove out of turn, rolling stop, no stop, drove past the white line). We noticed a few patterns this first week. For one, a large amount (about 1/3) of the vehicles that violated traffic laws were some shade of silver. In addition every bike we saw with the exception of one ran right through the four way stop without any regard for the law. I am curious whether this is because bicyclists are unaware that they are supposed to stop, or if they simply do not care. We allowed for some leeway for all of the traffic violation so that the results were not biased. In other words if we noted that a car went past the white line at a four way stop, it had to be close to half the car over the line rather than just going slightly over. It is likely that this will not be our final ethnography idea because of the lack of interaction with the people in the study. It is also very difficult to obtain qualitative data.

Group Members: Jacob Lillard, Jimmy Ho