| Draft Environmental Impact Statement Shorts School Road Am Antenna Structures 28 were then averaged and listed at the bottom of the rating sheet as the �Total Visual Quality� rating for each view under the existing conditions or proposed alternatives. This represents the culmination of the Level 1 rating process. The next step in the rating process, Level 2, occupies the last four rows of the ratings sheet (Table A.3). It attempts to compensate for the fact that individual viewers will react to a given degree of change differently depending on their own sensitivities to a view. For example, a visitor to a national park would be expected to be much more sensitive to a major visual change in the landscape than would a highway motorist passing by at high rates of speed. In this case, the motorist would have fewer expectations about what they would expect to see on their journey, and would be seeing it for a much shorter amount of time, whereas the park visitor would have high expectations about the scenic beauty to be observed in a nationally famous landscape. Likewise, a homeowner would have much greater expectations about the quality of view from their property than an agricultural worker would about the quality of view from a field they were working in. In the former case, the quality of view would impact a homeowner�s enjoyment of their property, as well as concerns about the value of that property. In the latter case, the worker is being paid to be there for their productivity, not necessarily to be enjoying the view (not that their enjoyment is a bad thing, but their sensitivity is judged to be less). As identified in Table A.2, for the purposes of this study local residents are identified as the most sensitive viewers, visitors to local parks and those involved in other recreational pursuits are judged to be the next most sensitive, and passing motorists and agricultural workers are judged to be the least sensitive viewers. To account for these sensitivities, the actual measured degree of change in overall visual quality was identified, then multiplied by a sensitivity factor to arrive at a �perceived degree of change�. This perceived degree of change was then subtracted from the visual quality rating of the existing conditions to arrive at the �adjusted visual quality rating,� which measures the expected visual quality following project implementation. The adjusted visual quality rating incorporates both the degree of change and the perceived degree of impact based on viewer expectation. This process can be described in a quasi-mathematical formula as follows: Total Existing Visual Quality � Visual Quality with Proposed Project = Degree of Change Degree of Change * Viewer Sensitivity = Perceived Degree of Change Total Existing Visual Quality � Perceived Degree of Change = Adjusted Visual Quality Rating Viewer sensitivity ratings range from a value of 1 for the least sensitive viewers to a value of 3 for most sensitive viewers. Therefore, the higher the sensitivity of the viewers, the more the visual quality rating would be adjusted. The visual quality ratings for the proposed alternatives are presented in Section 3.2. |