It’s official – I’m a published (co-)author! If you’re interested, you can read “Pedestrian and light transit accidents: An examination of street redesigns in Atlanta and their safety outcomes” now. If you’ve read the article, share your thoughts with me! I’d love to hear more views and opinions on the content we presented. But if you’d humor me for a minute, I’d like to share some lessons I learned while writing this paper. They might help you in your own work – writing or otherwise.
Draft Early, Draft Often, Draft Again
Before it was a journal article, our paper was a term project for Accident Causation and System Safety, a fascinating class discussing why accidents happen and how to prevent them. Internally, we revised our paper over and over again. We finally created a product that the four of us were happy with and submitted it to our instructor, Dr. Saleh, in December 2019. We got our final grades back, and that, we thought, was the end of it. The next semester, Dr. Saleh contacted us. He had enjoyed our paper and wanted to know if we’d consider publishing it with him. This was where the real fun began. Dr. Saleh had enough experience publishing papers to know that ours needed “surgery,” as he often put it. Like editorial doctors with literary scalpels, our team of five set to work. We spent hours, as one teammate put it, “arguing about whether that Oxford comma should go there, whether this quotation should go here…” After months of work, we had a new draft that looked nothing like the project we had submitted. We turned it in to the journal in the summer of 2020 and waited.
And then the reviewers delivered their comments back.
They were intense. We had patted ourselves on the back because of how much better this draft was compared to the term project we had submitted months prior, but the reviewers didn’t know nor care. They had serious concerns in several areas, excellent points that needed to be addressed. Armed with fresh perspectives, we attacked it anew, adding over three thousand words in the process. That version came back with glowing reviews and needing only minor tweaks. We were finally ready to publish.
When we submitted our term project, my co-authors (Matt, Chris, and Mikkel) and I were satisfied with our work. After the final version was accepted by the journal, we all agreed: the term project was the written equivalent of a dumpster fire. When we first started writing, e-scooters had descended on Atlanta; we were interested in their effects on pedestrian travel and their interaction with motor vehicles. But if you read the published paper, you’ll barely find a dozen references to scooters in the nearly ten thousand words we wrote.
The lesson? Iterate, iterate, iterate. If we had focused exclusively on e-scooters, we never would have found the wealth of information we stumbled into. If we hadn’t accepted the reviewers’ (valid) criticisms, we would have missed out on incredibly important analysis.
Pivot
When drafting, you’re focused on hammering out a basic product and repeatedly improving. But sometimes, you’ll find that you’re running into a wall. When we began our research, we centered on e-scooters. But private companies were (unsurprisingly) unwilling to share proprietary data with curious undergrads. The city was just beginning to grapple with regulatory issues surrounding scooter use, so they had little to offer.
So, we pivoted. What if we focused on accidents involving pedestrians? Then we noticed the number of bicyclist-related incidents. That was worth investigating. And what about all the other “miscellaneous” wheeled transportation? Mopeds, scooters, and more joined the party, creating a new term we coined “LIT+” (you’ll have to read the paper if you want to know what the acronym stands for!)
If you’ve read the paper, you’ll also know that our ideal measure of performance was seeing a decrease in accidents per number of “LIT+” users. But much to our disappointment, we could find no collected data that gave us our denominator: how many pedestrians were crossing an intersection, how many cyclists were using a bike lane, etc. It would have been easy to throw up our hands and give up entirely.
Instead, we pivoted. What if we could compare accidents to the number of vehicles that drove through a stretch of roadway? That was a reasonable proxy and more importantly, it was data we had access to. We also used our lack of data as an even more potent thesis: the fact that city planners were not measuring this information meant that they had no real metric to judge whether redesigned streets (new bike lanes, crosswalks, etc.) were actually safer.
The lesson? If you hit a roadblock (pardon the pun), leverage it. You may have to reroute entirely, but sometimes a lack of an answer is an answer in and of itself.
Give and Take
My coauthors were fantastic. Matt and Chris were avid runners and cyclists, so they knew the streets we were talking about. Mikkel and I dove deep into dense documentation, finding sources to prove our points. And Dr. Saleh spent hours in field observations, backing up our stats with documented experiences. Everyone brought something unique to the table.
All that being said, we did disagree on things. There were certain phrasings that I was not a fan of (speaking from a purely literary perspective, not content). But everyone else on the team liked it, so I acquiesced. There were other points that one or more of our coauthors didn’t like, but we talked about it until we converged on a solution.
The lesson? Don’t argue about trivial things. My coauthors and I were all on the same page, just viewing the end goal from different angles.
Our term project group was formed on August 20, 2019. Our paper didn’t get published until March 24, 2021, a full 582 days later. Writing this paper was a long journey, but it was completely worth it. Maybe you’ve got an idea brewing. What’s your first step? Take it. And the next. And the next five hundred. One day, you’ll look back and be in awe of the view from the mountain top.