Thread by @LdnOntBikeCafe

It's that time again... watch this thread for your monthly @CityofLdnOnt Cycling Advisory Committee Update! 🚲🚲🚲🚲🚲🚲🚲🚲🚲🚲🚲 🧵👇

@CityofLdnOnt OK here we go, meeting wrap time. Hope this won't take too long. 11th meeting of the #LdnOnt Cycling Advisory Committee for 2019. Are you ready?
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@CityofLdnOnt 1. First on agenda was a report on the London Road Safety Strategy. The LRSS was a city program from 2014-19 designed to decrease traffic deaths and injuries, which is indeed a noble goal. The results we saw tonight didn't give me any confidence that streets are any safer.
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@CityofLdnOnt The goal of LRSS is to decrease road deaths and serious injuries by 10% by 2019. Were they able to do this? Staff says yes, however the evidence presented was inconclusive at best. It's unclear to me whether the correct parameters were measured. I'll let you be the judge.
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@CityofLdnOnt Some of the LRSS Strategies were educational, like this stop-motion Lego video. Also, note to professionals: please stop trying to make PXO happen.
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@CityofLdnOnt The next part of this thread is going to get into basic statistics, so please bear with me 🐻. The plot here shows hospital data of people with serious injuries resulting from a motor vehicle crash, per 100k city population. I scooped the data from the presentation, missed 2012.

@CityofLdnOnt The error bars represent one standard deviation, although you could use standard error instead which would decrease the error bars by 2/3. The result is similar, but shows there has perhaps been some progress.

@CityofLdnOnt The big question for me is whether those three data points at the end are "real" and are attributable to City activities, or whether they're an artifact of some other activity (say, an overall decrease in total driving). However, there's a deeper problem with the dataset...
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@CityofLdnOnt The data set measures "collisions per 100,000 residents", not collisions per 100,000 km driven. To actually demonstrate that your streets are safer, you need the (much more difficult to measure) latter. The former is just a cheap proxy that's easier to quantify.
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@CityofLdnOnt Admittedly, measuring vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT, or VMT if you're American) is much more difficult, but it's important. Decreasing VKT actually decreases collision data in the City's measurement approach, so if people are driving less, fewer collisions will occur.
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@CityofLdnOnt Are people actually driving less? The data is inconclusive, BUT we do see a 13% decrease in total gasoline purchases in the city since 2007, and only a 10% improvement in average fuel economy over the same time period.
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@CityofLdnOnt A possible hypothesis:
a) population has increased, but
b) total gasoline use has decreased by 13%, and
c) fuel economy hasn't improved as much as gasoline has decreased (10%), therefore
d) per-resident VKT is likely down, thus a decrease in collisions per resident observed.

@CityofLdnOnt So in general, I was fully unconvinced by the data presented that was used to say that City programming was responsible for decrease in serious collisions. I'm not even sure the rate of collisions per km driven (the stat that actually tells you about safety) has decreased at all.

@CityofLdnOnt There have certainly been improvements in street design in the past few years, particularly red light cameras, and traffic calming measures. But, attributing those measures to damage reduction when we don't actually know how many kms people drive is *really hard*
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@CityofLdnOnt 2. Development applications. One in Westmount (recommended adding bike parking), and Victoria Park Secondary Plan (we recommended secure, covered bike parking, and safe bike connections to other bike infrastructure). Very well done, @london_chrisp & @JamiesonRoberts.
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@CityofLdnOnt @london_chrisp @JamiesonRoberts 3. Bylaw enforcement of bike lane parking. We aren't getting our own @TPS_BikeHart yet, BUT we have a vastly improved system for enforcement coming soon. In 2018, 19 tickets were issued for parking in bike lane. They needed to be physical tickets, hard to catch.
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@CityofLdnOnt @london_chrisp @JamiesonRoberts @TPS_BikeHart New system incoming is *fantastic*. The bylaw officer can walk down the street, take a picture of your licence plate, and a photo of you parked in the bike lane, click send and you get your ticket in the mail. Way faster/easier to enforce, so #LdnOnt, don't park in bike lanes.

@CityofLdnOnt @london_chrisp @JamiesonRoberts @TPS_BikeHart 4. Updates from sub-committees and working groups.
- Sport committee deferred their report until next month
- #ReadTheReportLdn committee gave update on progress at council, we discussed some procedural issues, and stated for the record we're pleased the work is moving forward.

@CityofLdnOnt @london_chrisp @JamiesonRoberts @TPS_BikeHart 5. Work Plan - we discussed the scope of work plans in general, approved the remaining 2019 work plan, and struck a committee to develop our 2020 work plan document ASAP. This was an important learning from the last month's activity.
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@CityofLdnOnt @london_chrisp @JamiesonRoberts @TPS_BikeHart 6. Transportation Demand Management - last month Jay Stanford & Alison Miller presented progress on a number of bike things like bike share, and bike data management. Since they didn't give us the report in advance last time, we asked them to submit for comment this month.
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@CityofLdnOnt @london_chrisp @JamiesonRoberts @TPS_BikeHart I had a brief Q&A exchange with Jay asking about the #LdnOnt Climate Report that was released today, asking what that meant for TDM, and cycling in general. I didn't quite get a satisfactory answer, but I'm not sure anyone really knows what the result will be...
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@CityofLdnOnt @london_chrisp @JamiesonRoberts @TPS_BikeHart Contained in the TDM report was a statement about how the City has a stated goal to decrease VKT on city streets, and I asked how we plan on doing that if we can't measure it. He replied that they're open to creative ideas.
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@CityofLdnOnt @london_chrisp @JamiesonRoberts @TPS_BikeHart 7. There was a letter received from the committee chair that resulted in some debate about procedures, policies and the role of advisory committees. Some good things came out of the discussion, including a request for a procedures Q&A with clerks' office to avoid future misteps.

@CityofLdnOnt @london_chrisp @JamiesonRoberts @TPS_BikeHart 8. Finally there was a letter from a concerned member of the public who wants to see more bikes employed for things like @CWA_SG, and to get more people on bikes for transportation. We thanked him for his letter, and received it for future consideration.

@CityofLdnOnt @london_chrisp @JamiesonRoberts @TPS_BikeHart @CWA_SG That's it, that's all, folks! #SorryNotSorry about the stats discussion, happy to follow up if you have more questions. See you next month for another thrilling update! - Signing off #LdnOntBike for a good night's rest. 😴💤

Aside: by using total residents as the denominator, the inherent assumptions are a) all new residents drive the same amount as existing residents, regardless of where they live, and b) existing residents don't change habits.