PennDot’s Survey
On June 7th, PennDOT released the “results” of their planning study. where they solicited community feedback on their proposal for a highway widening project on I-95 in South Philly. They solicited feedback on three parts of their plan: Penn’s Landing, Walt Whitman Bridge, and the Broad Street interchanges.
They published, in part, the following two slides. I wanted to get the actual survey results to see how accurate these stats are. My conclusion is that these slides are pretty misleading.
I submitted a Right-to-Know Law request to Penn DOT seeking, in part,
[A]ll records reflecting any and all comments received from the public as referenced in PennDOT's I95 CSP SAC Meeting Slideshow at Slide 16 (https://95revive.com/news/june-2024-csp-planning-study-sac-meeting-slideshow/).
On July 9th, PennDOT sent me a denial letter completely unmoored from the reality of Pennsylvania Law. They claimed that the survey results were exempt 1) as records relating to a noncriminal investigation, and 2) a record reflecting the internal predecisional deliberations of the agency.
I wrote back to the PennDOT open records officer right away, reminding him that the Right-to-Know Law specifically provides that “the results of public opinion surveys [and] polls” are not exempt. However, he did not respond to this, so I filed an Office of Open Records appeal.
Once I filed the OOR appeal, PennDOT’s lawyer reviewed the matter and confirmed I was right.
When PennDOT did finally produce responsive records, it was three janky PDFs. I wrote back requesting that they re-send it as an excel file. And this is where I learned something new - there’s already an OOR Final Determination addressing this and clarifying the distinction between “medium” and “format” under the RTKL. A requester is entitled to records in the medium requested if it exists that way - if you request electronic records and the agency has it on their computer, great. (“A record being provided to a requester shall be provided in the medium requested if it exists in that medium; otherwise, it shall be provided in the medium in which it exists.” 65 P.S. § 67.701.") But the agency does not have to provide records in any particular format, even if they maintain the records in that particular format.
https://www.openrecords.pa.gov/Appeals/DocketSheet.cfm?docket=20231750
You are not entitled to records in a specific “format.” If you want an excel file, but the agency wants to give it to you as a PDF, they can satisfy their obligations under the law that way. I asked very politely and they said no.
The full spreadsheets are posted at the bottom of this post. I went through and did my own tally, which is telling a different story than PennDOT’s pie charts.
For Penn’s Landing Interchange, PennDOT is saying they got 652 total responses recorded. However, by my count, 652 people logged on to their weird website, but only 69 - 129 (depending on which plan) selected a preference/left a comment. The four possible options were: high, medium, low, none, and “select”, which I am interpreting to mean none. By my count:
High - 8
Medium - 7
Low - 4
None/Select - 50
For Broad Street, I counted:
High - 8
Medium - 14
Low - 10
None/Select - 52
For Walt Whitman
High - 20
Medium - 2
Low - 4
None/Select - 103
I’m reposting one of the slides from the PennDOT slideshow here. PennDOT is saying that 50% of their survey respondents preferred the “high concept” plan for Walt Whitman. But that is a) actually only 20 people, and b) not 50% when you include people who filled out the survey with “select” didn’t chose high/medium/low and count them as “none” - it’s more like 16%.
PennDOT’s counsel confirmed that all of the blank rows represent people who didn’t leave a comment or vote.
Here are the three spreadsheets where you can read people’s actual comments, or count the votes up yourselves and tell me I was off by one or two.