Page 33 - Ashbourne Park

STEPS TOWARDS AN AGREED STATEMENT OF FACTS
And stipulations

7.5 Comments on Key Elements (Continued)

The EDF building is no longer operational thus any flow from the development site is
incremental.

The figures produced in the transport statement are highly misleading. They
exaggerate what had been the flow of traffic from the EDF site and grossly Page | 25
underestimate flows from a development site.

A case was constructed around data produced by the TRICS database. TRICS is sponsored by
six UK counties and purports to calculate traffic flows based on variables, including the
number of households contributing to a flow or the square footage of office blocks. It is
widely used by developers and planners; incredibly presenting data to 3 or 4 decimal places
of accuracy.

In fact, TRICS is a crude and unreliable tool especially when it is finessed to produce a
desired result.
Motion Consultants selected two TRICS data base categories for its analysis:

a) Offices with a floor space of between 186 sqm and 5,000 sqm to calculate the flow
from the 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
st
th
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 represented the
demographics and commuter travel times and patterns of WH, or the percentage of car
ownership per dwelling. Sixteen of the twenty-two datasets were from the north of England.
Also, the peak hour flows were arrivals at the EDF building and departures from the proposed
development.