On Thursday 5 January I gave a lightning talk at the Data Insights meetup about data blogging. Here are links to some of the things I mentioned:
Cambridge data:
Workflow:
Cool stuff:
Thanks to everyone who came to the talk!
Cambridge City Council recently conducted a survey asking residents for their views about bin collections. As well as an online survey, which got 431 responses, they also surveyed 1000 residents by telephone. I made a Freedom of Information request to get hold of the results.
One of the most controversial questions the survey asked was about “chip and bin”:
In order to implement a reward scheme it might be necessary for the bins to have microchips. The microchip would identify your bin so that points could be awarded based on the amount you recycle. Would you be interested in taking part in such a scheme?
The general response was pretty negative. Here are the results from the telephone survey:
The Other responses were mostly “Don’t know”, or people with communal bins saying it wouldn’t apply to them.
The picture from the on-line survey was much the same:
Although there were fewer negatives than in the telephone survey, there were also fewer people saying it would encourage them to recycle more – just 10.7%.
The survey also gives figures by dwelling type and household size. People living in different dwelling types were all more or less equally opposed:
The larger Other figure for flats mainly represents people with communal bins.
People living in households of one or two people were more opposed than larger households:
Particularly in the context of a reward scheme, this is a pretty solid thumbs down. It looks like Cambridge City Council will have an uphill struggle to get local residents to accept microchips in their bins.
UK political parties have to make regular financial reports to the Electoral Commission, and this provides a lot of data about their activities. Parties aren’t required to provide membership figures, but they often do include them in their reports. Here are the figures for the Cambridge Parliamentary consituency, which covers all of Cambridge City except Queen Edith’s ward:
The Lib Dems dutifully report their membership every year, and it has risen by about 30% since 2001, with a noticeable boost in General Election years (2005 and 2010).
Labour has only included a couple of membership figures in their reports, 632 for 2005 and 797 in 2010, a 26% rise over five years. 2005 was of course the year that Labour’s Anne Campbell lost the Cambridge parliamentary seat to David Howarth, with the Iraq War a major issue.
The Cambridge Conservative party hasn’t made any reports to the Electoral Commission, presumably because its turnover doesn’t reached the required threshold of £25,000, and I haven’t found any membership figures for them. Would any of my Conservative readers care to comment?
The Greens made their first report in 2010, as their vigorous General Election campaign sent their annual spending in Cambridge to £44,783. Their report gave their total membership in Cambridge as 114, up from 96 the previous year.
Of course, all these numbers are pretty small compared to the overall size of the Cambridge electorate, which is 75,259 for Parliamentary elections. It’s also interesting to compare them with the membership of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign (over 1,100), and Cambridge Past Present & Future (over 1,700), though both these organisations cover a wider area than the Cambridge Parliamentary consituency.
The Electoral Commission reports also include a lot of information about donations to and spending by local parties, and I’ll be looking at this in a future post.
In the Autumn Statement yesterday, the Government announced that it will invest £20 million “to reduce congestion on the A14”. This was welcomed by local politicians including Cambridge MP Julian Huppert and County Council leader Nick Clarke. However, it’s worth comparing this amount with the £1.1 billion of improvements to the A14 that were cancelled by the Government in 2010. Each block represents £1 million:
It’ll be interesting to see what measurable difference to the A14 this money will actually make. Julian Huppert has said he will find out exactly what is planned. The Autumn Statement also announced £110 million for widening the A14 Kettering bypass in Northamptonshire.
In a bit of a departure for this blog, today I turn my attention to the city of Portsmouth. This is not because I’m bored of Cambridge (perish the thought), but rather because Portsmouth was the first place in the UK to introduce a city-wide 20 mph speed limit, of the sort that some people would like to see introduced here.
In Cambridge, the Liberal Democrats are currently distributing a survey about 20 mph speed limits to selected households. Although presented as a questionnaire, the accompanying leaflet and letter from Julian Huppert argue strongly for a blanket 20 mph limit, and some of the questions seem designed to get the answers that the Lib Dems want to hear. Question 4, for example, reads “Do you think we should have a 20mph limit for all roads in the city, or just in residential areas?” We should be cautious about any claims the Lib Dems make about Cambridge opinion on the basis of this survey. I hope they will publish the data they collect, so it can be analysed independently.
Anyway, what has Portsmouth’s experience been with 20 mph limits? The Portsmouth speed limits were introduced in 2007-08, at a cost of about £570,000, and cover 94% of Portsmouth’s road network. The Department for Transport published a detailed report last year on the results so far. Here are some highlights from it:
Firstly, what difference has it made to traffic speeds? Well, not a huge amount. Across the city, average speeds are 1.3 mph slower than they were before.
This is similar to Cambridge’s experience with our own more limited 20mph zones, which on the whole have made little difference to traffic speeds. It’s worth noting that, unlike Cambridge, average traffic speeds in Portsmouth were already mostly below 20 mph before the reduced limit was introduced.
Secondly, has it made the roads safer? Well, yes and no. Here are the figures for the number of people killed or seriously injured before and after the change:
As you can see, the number of people killed or seriously injured actually went up after the change. This was entirely due to more pedestrian casualties – there were 8.7 per year after the change, compared to 6.3 before, a rise of 38%. However, the numbers involved are very small, so random fluctuation may have played a significant role. The story was better for slight injuries:
Here the figures fell by 18.6%, with all categories of road user seeing improvements. However, it’s worth noting that traffic accident figures have also been falling elsewhere in recent years, so it’s debatable how much of this drop was due to the speed limit change.
Thirdly, and of particular interest to politicians, do people like the change? On the whole, they do. Here are the satisfaction figures from a survey of around 1,400 Portsmouth residents:
Unfortunately the report doesn’t give the raw figures, so I’ve just taken the graph directly (recolouring it for clarity). Also, although the survey asked people whether they were “fairly” or “very” satisfied or dissatisfied with the change, the report doesn’t give these figures either. So it’s possible that there are stronger opinions at one end of the spectrum than the other. But the overall picture is clearly that more people favour the change than oppose it.
Like Cambridge, Portsmouth has a Lib Dem majority on its City Council. It’s likely that the 20mph debate will be a feature of Cambridge local politics for some time to come. Let’s hope it will be influenced by the data.
The Lib-Dem-controlled Cambridge City Council is very keen on recycling, and has made a considerable investment over the last decade to increase the amount of household waste being recycled. How are they doing compared to other local authorities?
Some figures published in the Guardian datablog today give the picture. Cambridge currently recycles 44% of its household waste, slightly ahead of the UK average of 41.2%. However, you could argue that the important thing is not the percentage of waste recycled, but rather the total amount of waste that isn’t recycled. On the whole, reducing the amount of waste produced is better than producing lots of waste and recycling some of it. Fortunately, the figures cover this too, so we can see how the two numbers relate. Here’s the data for each local authority in England:
In the top left corner we have Surrey Heath, recycling 65% of their waste, with just 281 kg/household not recycled each year. In the bottom right corner, in fact some way off the edge of the chart, are the Isles of Scilly, recycling just 19% of their waste, with a massive 1,425 kg/household not recycled. Cambridge is slightly better than middling.
As well as benefitting the environment, councils have a strong financial incentive to increase recycling, in the form of landfill tax. This currently costs them £48 per tonne sent to landfill, and it is set to increase by £8 per tonne each year for at least the next several years. Cambridge City Council is currently running a consultation about its bin collection service, which closes on Monday, with a view to increasing the efficiency of the service. Among other things this consultation is asking whether people are prepared to accept microchips in their bins to monitor the amount of waste. It’ll be interesting to see what responses the consultation gets.
Cambridge’s annual fireworks display will be taking place on Midsummer Common in a couple of days. Let’s hope the weather improves. How much does it cost the City Council to put the display on? Councils are now required to publish information about payments to suppliers over £500, and commendably Cambridge City Council also includes details of payments below this amount. So it’s fairly straightforward to dig out the figures for last year’s fireworks display:
£9,450 went to pay for the actual fireworks, slightly exceeded by the £9,634.80 spent on hiring sound equipment. £6,220 went on hiring a traffic management system, and £4,036.10 on security services – these were provided by three different security firms, BDI Securities, Show & Event Security and Spartan Rescue Ltd. You have to wonder why three different firms were involved. There was also £1,400 for catering – it would be interesting to know more about this, too. Portable toilets cost £1,585. St John Ambulance received £1,000 (not paid until the following April), Cambridgeshire Police got £481.85, and £598 went to Student Community Action for stewarding.
The total amount spent was £38,181.85. The city council did manage to collect £22,000 in sponsorship, plus whatever they collected from the crowd on the night.
There’s a huge amount of information in the Payments to Suppliers data, which will help to make all sorts of Council activities more transparent. This can only be a good thing – and I’m sure there are many more interesting tidbits lurking in the files.
