Has cycling on Calton Avenue gone up by 231%?

The Interim Monitoring Report, published in July 2021, draws a number of conclusions about the Dulwich Streetspace measures from traffic data collected so far. (The second tranche of traffic data, and data on air quality, are both still missing.) Southwark Council promised that they would make the raw data available, and would provide details about the methodology behind their analysis, in order to make the whole process as transparent as possible. This, however, hasn’t happened.

Luckily, because of historic data already in the public domain, we’ve been able to analyse one of the report’s most startling claims – which is that cycling on Calton Avenue has gone up by 231% since the Streetspace measures were introduced. Our report shows that this is a grossly overstated claim – and one that could only be made by ignoring other available data and choosing instead a questionable and inappropriate baseline. Using Southwark’s own monitoring count from June 2020 as a baseline, the actual increase to April 2021 was 64 cycles a day, or 8%.

Is this evidence of bias? Did it affect the way people responded to the consultation? Are other statistics in the report equally unreliable?

It would seem that Cllr Rose, who makes her decision on the Dulwich road measures later this month, might not be receiving accurate information.