Where to put the bins

Whitehouse Community Council built a two-page survey in one afternoon, got 39 answers in nine days, and had a recommendation inside a month. Full story with pictures: Whitehouse dog bins on mapsurvey.org.

The question

Whitehouse is a growing estate on the western edge of Milton Keynes. Its fourteen dog-waste bins were installed when the estate was smaller, and the council had an annual budget for more. Rather than choose the sites from the office, it asked residents a single question: where is a bin missing?

How the survey was built

Two pages.

• Page 1: a map showing the fourteen existing bins as blue dots, with the instruction to drop one pin where an extra bin would be useful. The pin opened a sub-question with four reasons, popular dog-walking route, too far from an existing bin, dog fouling is a problem here, near a park, and an optional comment.
• Page 2: a few questions about the respondent.

The link went on the council’s website and Facebook page on 2 September 2026. Median completion time was 90 seconds.

What came back

Most responses arrived the same afternoon. Over nine days, 39 residents answered and 37 placed a pin (one placed two). 38 of the 39 used a phone.

The pins clustered at the entrances to the green corridor and at the footpaths into the woods, with “popular walking route” the reason chosen most. Around half the suggested sites were 200 metres or more from the nearest existing bin. A heat map of the pins showed the pattern at a glance.

Within a month the council recommended six new bins, concentrated along the green corridor and at the woodland entrances, with exact siting left to the warden. The proposal fitted the existing budget.

Four things the council would do differently, as told in the story: label the placement button more clearly (residents at first tapped the map instead of the button, and the prompt was renamed mid-survey); keep showing existing infrastructure on the map; let residents support a pin someone else has placed instead of adding a duplicate; and share the link more than once, since the first post brought 27 responses in two days and a reshare a week later brought ten more.

What it teaches

• One mapping task, one pin, one reason. The survey asked the only question that mattered and nothing the council could not act on (Designing a map survey, rules 2 and 10). Ninety seconds is why 37 of 39 placed a pin.
• Show what already exists. The existing bins as a reference layer turned “where should a bin go?” into “where is the gap?” (Add a reference layer).
• Closed answers aggregate. Four reasons and an optional comment gave the council a table and the odd sentence that explained a corner (Writing questions people can answer on a map).
• Assume weak map literacy. The placement button needed renaming after launch. Say what to tap, and preview on a phone, because that is where 38 of 39 answered.
• Agreement beats duplicates. Several residents placed pins at the same corner. A shared map that lets later respondents agree with an existing pin reports that agreement as a count rather than as near-duplicate geometry.
• Promote more than once. The reshare added a third again to the sample.