Why won’t Southwark be clear about the data?

So here we are, the week before Christmas, puzzling over the latest data reports on the Dulwich Streetspace project. For some reason, Southwark decided to release Monitoring Report 3 (September 2021) on 13 December, just two days before the 15 December deadline for public responses to the statutory consultation report. After many of us emailed to point out the absurdity of giving people just 48 hours to assimilate all their latest claims, Southwark extended the final deadline to 22 December.

The first big question, of course, is why they weren’t able to release this report on September data in October. Or even November. Why halfway through December?

Is it just that – because the Dulwich decision must be taken by 29 December 2021, 18 months after the first of the experimental traffic orders went in – they didn’t want anyone raising difficult questions at the last minute?

The second big question is why the raw data and methodology have still not been published, despite the Leader of the Council’s promise to do so in July 2021. The latest September 2021 report includes a document called ‘Monitoring Study FAQs and Methodology Step-by-Step’ but this describes the general approach rather than giving any specifics. For example, we still have no information about which baseline data sets are being used for each monitoring site.

Baseline data is crucial. You can make current figures look like huge increases or huge decreases – whatever suits your purpose – depending on which baseline you choose. As we showed in our September report (‘Can we trust Southwark Council’s July 2021 Interim Monitoring Report on the Dulwich Streetspace measures?’) Southwark’s claim that cycling had increased on Calton Avenue by a startling 231% reduced to just 8% when the appropriate baseline count was used.

So what does the September 2021 data show? With no transparency about what has been compared with what, it’s not easy to analyse the figures. But we can make a few key observations:

1) As we pointed out in our November 2021 report, ‘Why the data doesn’t add up’ (hardly any of the questions we raised there have been answered), no attempt has been made to think through the impact on the data of local or national events (apart from Covid-19), from new year groups joining Charter School East Dulwich, to the petrol crisis in September 2021.

2) If – as the Council says – traffic across Southwark is still down by 7%, it seems that traffic on external roads (reported as down by 3% in the Dulwich Village area, down by 1% in the East Dulwich area, and down by 5% in the Champion Hill area) has actually gone up.

3) Pedestrian numbers are presented independently of any pre-LTN baseline data at all. Without this, how can anyone know whether more or fewer people are walking through key locations since the road closures went in?

4) Data from Dulwich Common, the Dulwich section of the South Circular, has not been included. Southwark gives a number of reasons for this (it’s a TfL road, there’s a section missing, etc). However, Dulwich Common is a key external road used by displacement traffic. By excluding this data, Southwark is not providing the full picture.

5) Finally, data is still not being presented clearly or transparently. To demonstrate this, we focus on East Dulwich Grove, described in the report as “a key external road”, which has around 4,000 children being educated and cared for at the numerous schools (and pre-school nursery) along its length. Two points to note:

• Substantial increases in traffic on this road (26% from September 2019 to September 2021) are outlined in a table in the report, but are missing from the associated infographic. Why? Because the increases don’t support the story of LTN success that Southwark is trying to tell?

• Against the background of these substantial increases, it turns out that a third ATC (Automatic Traffic Count) monitoring site was introduced a few months ago in September 2021 (see page 29 of the overall report). This new ATC is located in the middle of East Dulwich Grove, by the Tessa Jowell Health Centre. Because it’s a new site, there’s no baseline data. However, the September 2021 figures have been set against 2019 figures from “a comparable location” (it’s not stated where this is), and seem to have had an enormous influence on Southwark’s thinking.

In September, Southwark was convinced that a timed closure was best at this location, in order to relieve pressure on East Dulwich Grove. (As it said in its original FAQs, “The timed nature of the restriction ensures that traffic is distributed more evenly across the area whilst protecting active travel times to schools.”) It has now had a complete change of heart, apparently entirely due to data from the new ATC monitoring site and its unnamed “comparable location”. This shows – amazingly – that traffic in the middle of the road went down between 2019 and 2021, even though traffic at either end (the Dulwich Village end and the Goose Green end) went up.

This strange and inconsistent result couldn’t be clarified by looking at figures for Melbourne Grove south itself (see page 87 of the “Traffic Flow analysis” report) because the data – for some unexplained reason – was “too poor to analyse”. The Council appears to have been unwilling or unable to investigate further, preferring instead to revert to the original 24/7 closure (see point 14 in the report on the statutory objections). Does this level of muddled thinking inspire confidence? Is the data leading the decision-making – or is it, perhaps, the other way round?

All the way through the Streetspace process, Southwark has made it very clear that it prioritises its interpretation of the data over the views of the majority living and working in the Dulwich area.

So when the data is odd, or missing, or misrepresented, it begins to feel as if rational, fair and proportionate decision-making has completely disappeared.