A sure way to make money? Move Shoreditch 300m

Back when I first moved to the area, Wapping had an underground station and it served me well - Whitechapel for Sainsbury's in the north, and Surrey Quays for Tesco to the south. If I wanted to mix it up, I'd get the DLR to ASDA on the Isle of Dogs. At each extremity of the old East London Line were stations I never ventured to - Shoreditch, New Cross and New Cross Gate. Shoreditch was a bit odd, because I was pretty sure that trains ran there, but I was just never sure when, and as at the time we lived just north of The Highway (bad Wapping) we would just walk to the Brick Lane environs or get the 100 bus to Bishopsgate rather than walk to Wapping.

It may then seem churlish for me to care about the location of the replacement of Shoreditch Station - Shoreditch High Street station.

When TfL closed the ELL and gave us a phantom replacement bus service, I made a deal with TfL. I never told TfL this, but we had an unspoken arrangement. Part of that deal that I made with TfL in my mind about closing the ELL to extend it, was that I would give up the luggage racks and umbrella hooks of the old rolling stock in exchange for untold adventures that would be accessible to the north, in exotic places like...Brondesbury.

Shoreditch High Street
sneaks inside zone 1

Back when Red Ken was king, the idea of Orbirail was thought up - an orbital railway which would allow passengers to avoid zone 1 using largely pre-existing railway lines.

Well, that was the idea anyway. What actually happened was that someone got scared that extending the ELL would remove passengers (and thus revenue) from the South Central franchise operating out of London Bridge (currently operated by 'Southern'). As a result, Shoreditch High Street Station having moved 300m was required to be classified as being in zone 1 as a condition of DfT giving money to TfL for the extension. I'm not fully convinced by the logic of building infrastructure to provide additional capacity to alleviate overcrowding and then price it to ensure that it doesn't alleviate capacity constraints on the busiest part of the network as fully as it could, but this is by-the-bye.

The issue of Shoreditch's location in zone 1, is not new and has been discussed at length since 2009. Various campaigns were run to try and get it moved back to zone 2 but to little joy.

I almost always use 'pay as you go' (PAYG) on oyster, as my sporadic travel (such as walking to and from work) and holiday patterns means that a season ticket doesn't give me a clear economic benefit. So, whenever I touch in and out, I  keep an eye on my balance and how much is being deducted. Most of the time, I either stay within one zone, or go from one zone to another and I know how much these journeys will cost me. However, PAYG works on the basis of which zones you pass through, not just the start and end points. This is where the designate zone of Shoreditch High Street becomes important. All but one station on the Overground's circle is in zone 2 (Hoxton is in both).

I've done a table showing the various fares that you can be charged travelling between a few of the stations between Highbury & Islington, and Canada Water. Now, we know that all of the stations other than Shoreditch High Street are in zone 2. So surely, there are two journey types - zone 2 to zone 2 and zone 2 to zone 1 (which includes going through zone 1). This however is not the case. There are actually 4 fare types, three of which have differential pricing dependent on what time of day you travel.

Pay as you go fares for stations on the ELL

When travelling between stations which are south of Shoreditch, or north of of Shoreditch one pays £1.60 a journey in the peak and £1.50 outside of the peak.

Now, something slightly odd. If travelling from Wapping, Shadwell or Whitechapel to Shoreditch (we'll refer to these as the southern group shortly), one pays £2.10 for a single. But travel from Rotherhithe, it will cost you £2.40 in peak or £1.90 at other times. So people coming from south of the river pay a £0.30 premium in peak, but get a £0.20 saving off peak! The same relationship exists for stations between Dalston Junction and Hoxton (the northern group), compared to those further north.

And if you want to travel between what I've labelled the 'southern' and the 'northern' groups of stations? You pay £2.40/£1.90, but if you want to travel outside of these stations either side of Shoreditch, your fare jumps again, this time to £2.80/£2.10. [Update: TfL have informed me that the different pricing on these stations is due to it being a 'national rail' zone 1-2 fare rather than a standard TfL zone 1-2 fare]

What I'm trying to get across, perhaps very well if what I've just written isn't clear, is that TfL has successfully managed to make travel between these stations very confusing if you're on a budget. I've seen people who only keep the bare minimum on their oyster cards getting emotional at Shadwell when they discover that the zone 2 to zone 2 journey that they thought they were making and which they budgeted as costing £1.60 actually cost £2.80 (or 75% more than expected!) meaning that they don't have money to get home.

One way around this is to go on the Jubilee Line or DLR to Stratford and then take the spur of the Overground to Highbury & Islington, using the pink validator, but certainly during the peak, sharing a train with commuters to Canary Wharf doesn't necesarily make for the most pleasant journey.

The financial impact on Londoners

Having noticed these odd pricing patterns I thought I'd find out what the impact of Shoreditch High Street being in zone 1 was. So I submitted an FOI request to TfL which revealed:

• A total of 7.3 million passengers board or alight at Shoreditch High Street.
• A total of 9 million passengers pass through Shoreditch High Street station but do not alight.
• An extra £7 m per year is generated by Shoreditch High Street’s location in zone 1 rather than zone 2
• There is no plan to reconsider which zone Shoreditch is in

So. Passengers are paying an extra £7m a year on PAYG credit just to pass through a single station in zone 1. The actual cost to commuters will be even greater as people using travel cards will have been forced to pay for a travel card including zone 1, even if their start or end point isn't in zone 1.

[Update - a note of caution: I asked what the cost to passengers who pass through Shoreditch is, so I assume this is what the £7m is, but no details of the calculation were provided. I've asked for clarification on which passengers this relates to. However, even if it includes those alighting at Shoreditch, it's still likely to be significant]
What is key to this issue is the funding agreement with DfT: to obtain £24m to fund the extension TfL agreed to put Shoreditch in zone 1. So not only did TfL receive £24m free of charge from the government, they also get an additional £7m per year than had they stumped up the cash and done the logical thing of putting it in zone 2, or zone 1/2. I could understand keeping Shoreditch in zone 1 if the additional fares financed the extension, but in fact it just goes into TfL's coffers, punishing the residents of East London who seek to avoid the much more crowded underground.

Any old iron?

Despite not being a Cockney, and being a mere economic migrant to these fair lands, I have decided to get into the spirit of the Cockney Heritage Festival. There are many things about Cockney culture I don't get*, however, music hall is one I do appreciate.

So in a tenuous linkage I asked Tower Hamlets if they had any old iron?**.

So what is the answer? Disappointingly it's, yes/no/maybe.

I asked this question, inspired by @olopoto's curiosity, on what happened to metal railings when they were removed by the council. I asked the council about the quanity of railings that had been removed (linear metres of railings, weight of the scrap metal etc) over the past five years.

However, LBTH don't keep a record as they state that most railing removal is ad hoc. I (and I think @olopot) had assumed there was a financial impetus to removing railings, as the metal would have scrap value which would give rise to the likelihood of an organised removal to generate some cash, but this appears not to be the case.

The Council's full response to my question:

We do not have details as to the quantities of metal that have been removed in total as this is generally carried out as part of much larger highways / parks improvement schemes on an ad hoc basis. The cost for the removal of railings has been subject to competitive tendering and varies according to whether items are fit to be recycled or reused.We would expect that the tendered cost includes for scrap value and as storage costs for items set aside for re-use, we only store higher cost items for re-use: if we cannot re-use other items promptly disposal would be the most economic option.

So it looks like the council haven't considered the value of the metal in their street furniture and play it somewhat by ear as to whether to retain, recycle or sell.

Similarly, we also wondered about the recent programme of bin removal, which has seen metal bins replaced with plastic bins. I assumed this mass replacement was again a way of realising the value of the scrap metal. However, this does not appear (fully) to be the case, with a small number of them being redeployed elsewhere in the borough.

The response on the matter of bins was:

We do not have historic data but most recently we can advise that in August2012 a total of 7 metal bins were removed across the Borough. From January 2013 there were 25 metal litter bins removed from Wapping area. Although the bins may appear to be in good condition many of these bins had corrosion from the base. This deterioration makes the base unstable, the doors then become loose making themu nsightly and unsafe for use. Approximately 4 or 5 bins will utilised and have been earmarked to be used in a Tower Hamlets park. The unusable bins are currently in the process of being scrapped with best achievable prices being sought.  The weight of this type of bin is approx. 52 kg.

So how much would the sale of bins for scrap have been for?

We have 20 bins scrapped, each weighing 52kg, which gives a total of 1,040kg, or just over a tonne (metric). Given the number of stories about metal theft I was surprised to discover that steel isn't all that lucrative for scrap (unless it's stainless steel) and you're looking at getting around 15-30p per kg of  scrap, which translates to a miserable £156-£312. How much do plastic bins sell for? About £100-250 depending on design, so this bin refresh was not the lucrative exercise we expected or suspected!

*Coming from a culture where the pie is venerated and would only be sacrificed in a Judgment of Solomon situation, I cannot fathom why denizens of the East End tolerate such abuse of their baked meat goods. Whenever I've walked past a pie shop, or seen one on TV, I look at the almost universally blackened top of the pie and question at what point did it all go wrong. I can understand eel and parsley liquor going on an eel pie (which they were traditionall), but why this continued into the post-eel epoch (with or without eel in the liquour) I cannot comprehend.
** There are theories that the song 'Any old iron' is in fact a covertly gay work. (Iron hoof=poof; any old iron=are there any gay men)

Things you can learn from Freedom of Information

 Reading the Tower Hamlets FOI database one suddenly realises the massive range of issues that concern people. Having a look through the requests, I discovered the following random facts:

• There are 19, increasing to 21 lollipop people (officially known as crossing patrol staff). (request is here)
• The highest claim for housing benefit is £709 a week for an individual with three dependents (request is here)
• In 2011/12 10,784 households owed £2.8m in Council Tax to LBTH (request is here)
• Allowances paid to LBTH Councillors were £512k, with another £312k of special responsibility allowances including the Mayor's salary (request is here)
• LBTH does not own any property in Colchester (request is here)
• In 2011-12 the council prosecuted Council Tax and Housing Benefit fraudsters for the value of £617k (request is here)
• The number of prosecutions by Tower Hamlets trading standards has fallen by 90 per cent from 186 to 19 from 2008 to 2012 (request is here)
• Lutfur Rahman made no expense claims between 2010 and 2012 (request is here)
• The average weekly rent for a 2 bed council property is £100 (request is here)
• The Council made appointments to deal with 4,501  pest infestations (request is here)
• 3,000 families were expected to be affected by the 'bedroom tax' (request is here)

Time for an infographic me thinks!

Modelling fire brigade responses

In my last post I explained some of the processing of the London Fire Brigade incident data. In this post I look at the actual data and begin to consider what the impact of the proposed closure of Bow Fire Station.

Read more »

Scores on the doors - Food hygiene in LBTH

Once again, I found myself trawling through the LBTH FOI database and found a request asking about Scores on the Doors, which is a scheme that you may have seen whereby restaurants and food production companies display a score on their door or window (see what they did there?) which is based on the Food Standards Agency's food hygiene assessment scheme (see here for details).

The FSA is very good and provides the overall score as part of HM Government's open data policy, and even provides a useful API to extract exactly which data you want. Unfortunately, I read the full manual before realising they had provided a prepacked XML file to download for each Local authority. The data is of good quality, though unfortunately they don't include location data for businesses run on private premises such as Wapping Sourdough. There are a few errors in the data, namely about 4 data points currently showing as located outside of LBTH, which I haven't correct. Quite a few data points didn't have longitude and latitude, (mainly because of being private addresses), though I've gone through those that didn't using a lookup against my table of postcodes and coordinates. For a few remaining offenders it was due to incorrect, missing or partial postcodes, and I have manually added 20 or so postcodes (and thus locations).

The score ranges from 0-6. I've coloured the points on the following basis:

Red = 0 or 1.
Pink = 2
Yellow =3
Green = 4 or 5
Blue = awaiting scoring (such as Cinnamon Coffee in Wapping)

The scoring is based on these criteria:
5 = Very Good
4 = Good
3 = Generally Satisfactory
2= Improvement necessary
1= Major improvement necessary
0 = Urgent improvement necessary

 

Notes on the data and breakdown by type of business

I was pleasantly surprised with the results, with 83% of all food businesses achieving at least a '3'. However, it does mean that nearly a fifth of food businesses in LBTH aren't achieving satisfactory.

	0	1	2	3	4	5	Awaiting Inspection	Exempt	Total
Distributors/Transporters	1	5	1	22	21	18			68
	1%	7%	1%	32%	31%	26%	0%	0%	100%
Hospitals/Childcare/Caring Premises	0	0	0	1	11	28			40
	0%	0%	0%	3%	28%	70%	0%	0%	100%
Hotel/Guest House	0	1	0	0	1	7	1		10
	0%	10%	0%	0%	10%	70%	10%	0%	100%
Manufacturers and Packers	0	4	2	10	19	14	11		60
	0%	7%	3%	17%	32%	23%	18%	0%	100%
Mobile Food Unit						4	3		7
	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	57%	43%	0%	100%
Other Food Retailers	4	40	12	146	162	88	16	1	469
	1%	9%	3%	31%	35%	19%	3%	0%	100%
Primary Producers		1							1
	0%	100%	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	0%	100%
Pub/Club		10	1	66	62	60	4		203
	0%	5%	0%	33%	31%	30%	2%	0%	100%
Restaurant/Cafe/Canteen	15	79	21	198	221	306	44		884
	2%	9%	2%	22%	25%	35%	5%	0%	100%
Restaurants and Caterers - Other		3		8	19	12	4		46
	0%	7%	0%	17%	41%	26%	9%	0%	100%
School/College				25	26	54			105
	0%	0%	0%	24%	25%	51%	0%	0%	100%
Supermarket/Hypermarket				5	8	19	5		37
	0%	0%	0%	14%	22%	51%	14%	0%	100%
Take-Away	3	41	9	85	79	53	30		300
	1%	14%	3%	28%	26%	18%	10%	0%	100%
Total	23	184	46	566	629	663	118	1	2230

As the location is based on postcode, restaurants on the same street may be stacked on top of each other so I need to add some form of wobble into the locations. Use the FSA's website for upto date data or to check on your restaurant of choice (I'm using a static dataset here because of the data cleansing I've performed). This was downloaded on 17 September. The map shows food producers of all types, I'll see if I can produce one just for eateries without generating a new table, but this may need to be done outside of blogger.

 

Posted with Blogsy

How to spend a penny in Tower Hamlets

Browsing through LBTH's FOI database to look for some interesting data to analyse I came across this request on public toilets in the borough.

 So thanks to this FOIer now we know that there are no public toilets in LBTH other than 15 automated cubicles. I would love to know what prompted this request!

Council tax bands of all residential properties in LBTH

My intention at present as hinted in my last post is to use the data out there to understand my local area, both the physical environment, demographics and other issues in society. Developing further the map in my last post, I've expanded it to cover the whole of Tower Hamlets and also incorporating details on different council tax bands.

Excuse my slightly shoddy legend implementation- I'm constrained on coding because of using Blogger as my platform rather than hosting my own pages, however it does what it's meant to do, though the colours appear off because the colours on the map are partially transparent.

The caveat

I'm using council tax bands as a proxy for value of property (which they nominally measure, albeit in 1991 terms). There are three main characteristics that I would assume determine value, being location, size and quality of the building, clearly, it is difficult to control for all factors. I have an FOI request out for the type of housing stock (flats/houses/maisonettes and number of bedrooms) from the Valuation Office Agency, though what data they will supply I don't know (I've asked for it by postcode but I imagine I will get it on a higher level).

Read the map based on the area of a given colour that is visible, not the area of the circle as a whole. Ideally I'd plot individual properties, but I don't think I will be able to obtain this level of detail.

Zooming in on the map gives a much better level of detail.

The (brief) analysis

Looking at the borough as a whole, there is a north-south divide in the distribution of properties between the council tax bands, though, perhaps most accurately, it is a waterside-inland split. One merely needs to follow the Thames from St Katharine Dock round to the Limehouse Marina and round the Isle of Dogs as well as along the various canals. I've noticed a few other pockets of higher value properties which appear to occur in areas with a number of period properties, such as Spitalfields (though of course centrality will have a big impact), Columbia Road and around Sidney Square.

In Wapping, there is a larger number of properties rated band D and above, though there is a swathe of greens and yellows driven by the Greenbank estate and over towards Prusom Street. Whilst it is inaccurate to label band B & C properties as 'low value' (properties on the Greenback go for c.£250-£300k), but the council tax banding gives an indication of relative value and it is striking that there appears (at least graphically) that the relative value of properties is heavily determined by location.

One last note, the map shows nicely that the last undeveloped spot with respect of residential property in the Wapping area other than the parks and the John Orwell centre is...the News International site. What value people put on its future properties is yet to be discovered.

 

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H

But Sir, when will I ever use cosine?

The backstory...

I can't remember if anyone ever asked what the point of trig is in my maths lessons. This is possibly because it was so long ago, but mainly because I was a swot and was glad to be finally unleashing the power of my scientific calculator and was getting on with some maths.[1]

Other than thinking about trig when watching the Jeremy Brett adaptation of the Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual (spoiler alert) [2], I don't really think I've actually used it since school. So, when my passion for planning flared up and I started thinking in some depth about what was actually around me, I hadn't expected to fall into a rabbit warren of maths.

Last Saturday afternoon, having returned from a planning consultation on the News International site, and whilst my wife was asleep on the sofa, I did what any man would do. I submitted an FOI request to my local council LBTH, asking for details of how many residential properties were in the borough, which postcodes they were in, and which council tax band they fell into.

The quest... (or the boring bit)

I had been tinkering on google fusion with creating maps from data tables, and I had it in my head to use the fruits of my FOI request to plot this information. My aim was to create a map with circles (whose area related to the number of properties) centred on each postcode in the area. However, I discovered a number of issues:

1. LBTH likes to supply data in PDF format, requiring you to copy and paste from the pdf and then reformat the data into a table.
2. LBTH like to keep you on your toes by leaving out postcodes - fortunately I noticed that my previous two postcodes were not included and went back to them.[3]
3. Google Fusion does not readily accept postcodes without additional information such as the city and country associated with them, much preferring longitude and latitude to be supplied.
4.  KML, the XML type language that is widespread for geographic data (and supported by Google Fusion) does not have a function to draw circles.
5. I cannot code.

Points 1&2 were easy. 3, was ok - I initially downloaded a dataset from the Ordnance Survey that only had them based on OS National Grid references, a few google searches later found a link to the data with longitude and latitude. I could have applied a transformation onto the OS northings and eastings to convert them, but that sounded a bit too dull. 4. Was a bugger, and 5 is a fundamental failing of someone who wants to manipulate and present data on the web.

I'll go into the detail of the mechanics in a later post, but basically I needed to approximate a circle by drawing an icosagon, or 20 sided polygon, which required me to work out where the vertices would need to be relative to the position of the postcode and what this would be in longitude and latitude. Here comes the trig, what it took me a long time to realise was that a) trig functions on computers don't do degrees, they do radians b) once you've worked where the relative point is in radians, you need to convert it back to degrees and c) you need to plot vertices anti-clockwise in KML. All of which is simple, until you have to work it all out by trial and error, and frustration why nothing appears on your map, except a big close up of the Indian Ocean.

Eventually I did work it out and manipulated the data in Excel, as I'm not quite ready to start using google's API's, writing my own javascript or any such nonsense.

The end result (sort of)

So, the finished product. At the moment it includes only postcodes starting E1 in Tower Hamlets... , so includes E1, E1W and E14. This will be amended - this intial set of postcodes was done as a quick filter to makesure my formulae were correct in Excel before risking trying to geocode a failed attempt again (one failed attempt, when I forgot to adjust part of my formulae from radians back to degrees took two hours to geocode a relatively small number of points). Once it worked, there is no geocoding, it just does it.

At the moment, a property is assumed to be 64 square metres in area (I guessed that a modest two bed property with lounge-kitchen would fit in an 8x8 floorplan, though on subsequent checking the latest development in Wapping, 21 Wapping Lane states that their 'typical' two bed flat is 80 square metres, whereas a one bed is 48 square metres), such that the area of the circle is 64*number of properties. The next iteration will hopefully also map the relative proportion of properties by council tax band using concentric rings!

It surprised me that the circles weren't overlapping left, right and centre, particularly in residential areas, which suggests that there is more space (even if it is just a carpark or communal garden) than I might have expected. However, this may be an issue with my assumption on land usage. BTW the really big circle in the North East is the new Nido halls of residence in Spitalfields

Coming up next...

• The same map, updated for all LBTH postcodes and the composition of bands 
• A map showing overall density of different areas of Wapping and neighbouring boroughs
• An analysis of vacant properties in the area
   

Notes

[1] I had a misspent youth.

[2] Alas the last time I think I read the story was pretty much when I should have been studying for my GCSE maths - I had a very misspent youth.

[3] I should say that LBTH were very prompt and provided data on Tuesday, my wife exclamining 'they do know they've got another three and a half weeks to deal with that?' when I told her.