Page 35 - MJC submissions

STEPS TOWARDS AN AGREED STATEMENT OF FACTS
And stipulations

7.5 Comments on Key Elements: Traffic Flows (Continued)
The EDF building is no longer operational thus any flow from the 71 flats would be
additional. The figures produced in the transport statement are highly misleading.
They exaggerate what may have been the traffic flow from the EDF building and
grossly underestimate flows from the WH:EDF site.
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The application constructs a case for traffic reductions around data produced by the TRICS
database. TRICS is sponsored by six UK counties and purports to calculate traffic flows based
on many variables, including the number of dwellings adding to a flow or the square footage
of office blocks. It is widely used by developers and planners; incredibly, claiming accuracy to
3 or 4 decimal places.

In reality, TRICS is a blunt and malleable tool which can be finessed by users to
produce almost any result desired.

Motion Consultants selected two TRICS database categories for its analysis:
a) Offices with a floor space of between 186 sqm and 5,000 sqm to calculate the flow
from the “existing” EDF building; with data collected from 11 survey sites of which 7
were in the north of England and based on [only] 11 days of data between 2009 and
2017;

b) Residential flats in the range of 8 to 135 units to estimate the flow from the proposed
development, based data for only 11 days between 1 January 2009 and 9 th
st
November 2016.
Appendices C and D show the data sets used, as follows:

Table 7: Data sets used by Motion Consultants Ltd

The areas selected for a) were totally different from b) and neither represents the
demographics and commuter travel times and patterns of Ashurst Wood, car ownership or
parking spaces per dwelling. Sixteen of the twenty-two datasets were from the north of
England and eighteen of twenty-one relate to 2016 or earlier. Also, the morning peak hour
flows were arrivals at the EDF building and departures from the 71 flats.