Responsive data
During the first round of engagement, an issue affecting some streets but not others was the perception of roads being used as “cut throughs” or “rat runs”. Some of these concerns were raised by residents in streets not in the first consultation area. Across a large part of the consultation area, many people told us about parking congestion in their road.
To understand these concerns, and contextualise how they may vary across the area, we obtained telemetric traffic data and undertook a parking beat survey.
Telemetric traffic data is available from data aggregators who primarily work for the motor vehicle insurance industry. The anonymised data they collect for their clients is available to be purchased by traffic authorities and consultants to assist in traffic analysis and modelling, providing a far richer source of information than can be obtained using traditional survey methods, and much more cheaply than more costly automatic number plate recognition surveys. One particular advantage of this type of telemetric data is that is can be obtained retrospectively, so data going back quite some time can be obtained. This can avoid the pitfalls of a planned survey to capture the same information – as one-off unusual events during that survey period may compromise accuracy. By being able to retrospectively obtain data, unusual events can be avoided by simply not selecting the affected period if known, or by capturing a sufficiently long period such that the overall patterns end up dominating the data. The data can be analysed to show on each street (or section of street) what proportion of observed vehicles did or did not make a stop in a particular area. This therefore gives an indication of which streets are more susceptible to being used as “rat runs” or “cut throughs”. For this study, the area chosen was slightly wider than the original consultation area. This was in response to concerns raised by people living just outside that original consultation area. The area designated was the area bound by the railway line, Kenilworth Road and Beechwood Avenue (inclusive). Any vehicle passing through this area but not stopping was classified as “through traffic”, and any vehicle that started or finished its journey in this area was classified as “local traffic”. Because the telemetric data relies on GPS, data closest to the railway line may be less reliable.
The data also provides speed information, and this is over the average of each link (i.e. street or section of street), and thus is more nuanced that the “point” speed data of a traditional automatic traffic count. The map below shows the average speed on each street or section of street, classified into colour-coded ranges to enable variance in speed to be clearly visible. Because the telemetric data relies on GPS, data closest to the railway line may be less reliable.
