Category: Data

Seven years ago, I wrote “We don’t have individual building age open data in the UK” – but that is no longer true!

The MLUHC (for England Wales) and the Scottish Government via the Energy Saving Trust have been publishing individual Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), for both residential and non-residential buildings, for several years now, and the records go back to 2008 and 2013 respectively. As all new properties require EPCs, and they are also required regularly for rented properties and house sales, the proportion of buildings with these certificates has gradually increased, to around 50% of properties (around 40% in Scotland).

One of the attributes available on the domestic certificate bulk data is the approximate aged of the building – in approximately 10-year age bands. However, linking this to a location used to require using the decidedly non-open AddressBase columns in the dataset. However, more recently, the publishing authorities have added Ordnance Survey UPRNs (Unique Property Reference Numbers) to the data – and this can be linked with the UPRN Lookup tables published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) which contain locations (eastings and northings) of the UPRNs, which typically are the front door of each property.

By combining the UPRNs with the lookup, it is now possible to map building ages, for around half of the individual buildings in Great Britain. Moreover, it looks increasingly possible to distinguish residential from non-residential buildings (some have both uses, of course) which will potentially be a very useful attribute when mapping residential data, with the ability to blank out non-residential buildings. Many of CDRC Mapmaker’s maps show data based on the residential population only, so colouring business park buildings with the data never made sense.

The individual building data also allows a more precise look at the different areas of cities, based on their built form. The exact extents of housing estates, or Victoria terraces, are now obvious, from sharp changes in building age, tenancy type and floor area compared with neighbouring blocks, which sit in the same LSOA/Data Zone – the previous smallest unit of building age detail, from the previous best-resolution open-data dataset, from the VOA.

As part of this project, on CDRC Data I plan to, as soon as I am able to*, publish the individual (UPRN-by-UPRN) building attribute data, across Great Britain. I’ve also aggregated by Output Area (2021 for England/Wales, 2011 for Scotland) for domestic properties, and by Workplace Zone 2011 for non-domestic properties. (*Currently some other work on EPC data is being carried out at CDRC and that may take precedence.)

I’ve mapped these on CDRC Mapmaker. Using the PWC (population weighted centroids) for these, and mode/median based aggregates, allows aggregated representation of the data, when looking it at smaller zoom levels on the map. Zooming in reveals the individual building data. PWCs are useful because they retain the urban form – rather than arbitrarily assigning each OA to, for example, a river running through a development.

The inspiration for this project – mapping the age of Britain’s buildings – comes from this old but excellent example from the Netherlands. There is more to be done – assigning estimated ages for buildings nearby confirmed ones, and colouring in each block rather than just assigning a dot to a doorstep – which will follow.

I use buildings and properties interchangeably here – a property is a housing unit where a family/social unit live, and has an address – it might be in a single building or spread across several, and (more likely) a building may contain lots of addresses and properties, such as a block of flats.

At the end of each year (normally between Christmas and New Year), there’s a lot to tidyup across Bike Share Map (BSM), the Meddin Bike-Sharing World Map (BSWM) and the UK Shared Micromobility Dashboard. This year, I’m aiming to document all the changes needed, roughly around the time that I make the changes.

Monday:

• Superpedestrian (aka LINK) have unexpectedly changed their URL prefix for their GBFS feeds from https://wrangler-mds-production.herokuapp.com/gbfs/{City}/{file}.json to https://mds.linkyour.city/gbfs/[2.2/]{a2}_{city}]/{file}.json. Superpedestrian run the Nottingham escootershare, the fifth largest city for the mode in the UK, so it’s good to have the live data back for that. They also run various other escootershares around the world.
• A number of the UK shared e-scooter trials ended at the end of November: Slough (Neuron), Canterbury (Bird), West Bromwich (Voi) and Sunderland (Neuron) – the last due to be replaced by a new Zwings fleet but this will not now launch until the new year – a significant service gap. The Neuron systems had open GBFS feeds (as does Newcastle, their last remaining UK one, although at the time of writing it is returning a 503 server error), so could be tracked live. Canterbury and West Bromwich unfortunately aren’t. I’ve stopped consuming the GBFS feed for Slough and Sunderland.
• In addition, there have been very few (if any) escooters visible on many of the Ginger systems, on their app – Milton Keynes (where they compete with Lime and TIER), Hartlepool, Scunthorpe, Whitehaven and even Middlesbrough (the first trial to launch). Only Chester and Great Yarmouth are still going strong. As is often the case with Ginger in particular, there is no news about this. Maybe they are just taking a Christmas/New Year break? The parking locations and zone boundaries still show in their app – but they do for Stafford too, where Ginger pulled out in late 2021. There are GBFS feeds available for some of the Ginger systems, through the Joyride white-label platform they use.
• Normally I stop consuming individual GBFS (and other API) feeds during a system’s winter closure period, however the variation with when systems reopen in the new year mean I often miss a few days (or weeks!) when they do restart, so this year I will keep consuming the empty feeds. I am gradually building a guide to indicative months that systems close and reopen, on BSWM, and will correlate this with the data seen in BSM (where available) and publish this additional static data, some time next year.
• Lincoln’s tiny Hire Bike website’s certificate has expired, apparently without the operator noticing, so I needed to skip verification of it when getting the website data. To be fair, it did expire on Christmas Day…
• Aberdeen’s Bike Issue Bikes ebikeshare finally opened in early November – perhaps with some of their bikes from their recently closed Bristol operation. I have updated the BSWM entry.
• Down the coast, the Dundee ebikeshare has gone into a longer winter hibernation this year – more of a temporary closure during a quite time of the year to improve the fleet and operations, rather than snow/ice led, although Scotland is certainly getting some weather at the moment.

Beryl has published a couple of snapshots of how they are doing in Hereford and Bournemouth.

They’ve just finished a free bike week in Hereford, where they made their service free to use. They’ve reported 9500km travelled during the week. Assuming an average journey of 1.5km, this equates to 6000 rides in 7 days, or 900 a day. Across the fleet of 125, that suggests over 7 uses per bike per day (t/b/d) – great! They also reported just over 10000 journeys in their first month (this included the free bike week). This suggests an average t/b/d of just under 3 – great numbers.

They’ve also published this graphic showing where in Bournemouth (& adjoining Poole on the left) their bikes are being used – almost everywhere it seems!

My current estimates are:

System	Docking Stations	Bikes
Santander Cycles (Central)	781	7754
Mobike	n/a	~1800
Lime-E [pedalecs]	n/a	~1500
JUMP [pedalecs]	n/a	>500
Freebike [pedalecs]	263*	353
Beryl	109*	169
Santander Cycles (Uxbridge)	6	33
Bird [eScooters]	n/a	>50

Totals: 9750 manual bikeshare bikes, 2350 pedalec bikeshare bikes, 50 escootersshare scooters.

The numbers above don’t include private systems not open to the public, such as KU Bikes (university students) or IHS Markit Freebike (employees).

* Some docking stations are shared across providers – specifically, Freebike and Beryl share docking stations on the City of London, but not in the other areas they currently operate.

The relaunch of Exeter’s Co-Bikes electric dock-based system has taken place today, following some previous operations the last few weeks. You can see the system live on Bike Share Map.

The new fee is:

	Casual
Membership Fee	£0
Start Fee	£0
Usage Fee	£1/20 minutes
Usage Credit	N/A
Out-of-Hub End Fee	£24+
Out-of-Hub Start Credit	N/A

Journeys from 8-24 hours are capped at £24. Maximum hire is 24 hours – bikes hired for longer are assumed lost and the user is charged a hefty penalty.

Edinburgh‘s Just Eat Cycles has reported a record month in August, the month during which the Edinburgh Fringe and Edinburgh International Festival takes place and the capital’s population significantly increases. The system launched in September last year, just too late for the previous Fringe/Festival month. This month, the system managed 17,529 rides, with around 400 bikes available through the month across 70 docking stations. This represents around 1.5 trips per bike per day (t/b/d). The system including the above graphic showing routes taken. Just Eat Cycles has since added some additional bikes in, in early September, and now has around 500 available.

Just Eat Cycles publishes its trip and availability data as open data. The Trip data is published within a day of the trips happening, an impressively quick turnaround. They also publish regular maps showing routes taken. The above map, for August, includes at least one trip to Edinburgh Airport and another trip to Cramond Island (accessible by a causeway only at low tide). The former doesn’t have a docking station so journeys incur an out-of-station fee, but the journey may still have been cheaper than tram/parking surcharges. The latter does at least have a docking station nearby, back on the mainland.

Monthly journeys, bikes and average trips/bike/day for Edinburgh, so far:

Month	Trips*	Avg Bikes	Trips/Bike/Day
September 2018**	2277	140	1.1
October 2018	3799	186	0.7
November 2018	4047	302	0.5
December 2018	3662	360	0.3
January 2019	4750	233	0.7
February 2019	4222	108	1.4
March 2019	6549	341	0.6
April 2019	8176	441	0.6
May 2019	14160	258	1.8
June 2019	10214	243	1.5
July 2019	12290	309	1.3
August 2019	17529	386	1.5

* Journeys on the last day of the month are normally missing from the trips data.
** Launched mid-month.

Hopefully Edinburgh will get to 2 t/b/d soon – a figure which is, very roughly, is a good benchmark for a well used, long-term-viable system. Edinburgh’s design means it can very easily move docking stations around, to adjust to corridors of good use (and low vandalism), although this has to be balanced against the frustration of loyal users finding their docking station has gone.

Bournemouth and Poole’s Beryl Bikes system is reporting 2500 journeys on their fleet during the four days of the Bournemouth Air Festival. In time, the system is planned to have around 1000 bikes, however currently it has around 250 bikes available so this suggests an average of 2.5 journeys/bike/day. These are encouraging numbers, similar to what is seen in London’s Santander Cycles system and possibly larger than any other system in the UK apart from nearby Brighton, showing that the south coast of England is a bit of a winner for bikeshare systems.

It does also suggest that Beryl might have “cracked” how to make a commercially viable, affordable and sustainable mid-size system. Beryl Bikes are dock-based, but the docks are simply painted on the ground.

BTN Bike Share, a hybrid system launched in the tourist and student city on 1 September 2017, has increased its fees for the first time. Previously, casual hires were £1 for up to 35 minutes and then 3p/minute. They are now: £1/hire + 3p/minute. Annual subscriptions are now £72/year with 30 minutes/day ride time (down from 1 hour).

From 1 August 2019 (changes from previous shown in brackets):

	Casual	Annual Membership
Membership Fee	£0	£72
Start Fee	£1	£0
Usage Fee	3p/minute	3p/minute
Usage Credit	N/A (was 35 minutes/jny)	30 minutes/day (was 60 minutes/day)
Out-of-Hub* End Fee	£2	£2
Out-of-Hub* Start Credit	£1	£1

* Bikes parked near hubs (e.g. if the hub is full) are not considered to be out-of-hub.

The changes in charges seem designed to encourage shorter journeys, which, as this is a popular, well used system, is likely to make it more efficient. BTN Bike Share may in fact be the UK’s most well used bikeshare system.

Trip Numbers

Some data on usage between the launch and July 2019 (i.e. 22 months):

• 1.25 million miles travelled (2 million km). With an average of 320 bikes over 570 days that means each bike does an average of 11km a day – impressive!
• 650,000 journeys. This suggests an average journey of 3km and a typical 3-4 trips per bike per day (t/b/d). 3km is higher than the ~1-2km average distance travelled on a bikeshare bike across other cities, but then research does suggest electric bikeshares typically do result in longer journeys.
• 80000 subscribers. This sounds like a hugely impressive number considering the population of Brighton – so I wonder if this is actually the number of distinct users, including visitors taking one-off trips. I can’t believe that 80000 people are paying the annual membership fee.
• As of July 2019, the system reports they have 570 bikes and 68 hubs. On Bike Share Map we’ve seen a maximum of 459 bikes available for hire, seen at the end of May 2019 – a discrepancy of 24%. However, the number of hubs is correct.

Our own t/b/d research, looking at docking station data, suggests:

	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
2017	–	–	No data	2.3
2018	1.5	4.7	5.4	3.0
2019	2.8	3.9

We detected approximately 690,000 journeys which is broadly consistent with the published number. We notice that Brighton sees around 10% more journeys on weekdays than weekends.

(Data courtesy of James Todd.)

The system is publically funded, with the council investing £290,000, and the national government investing £1.6 million. The council receives back 50% of profits above £330k made by the operator.

BTN Bike Share is operated by Hourbike on behalf of Brighton & Hove City Council. It uses Social Bicycles pedelec bikes, an older version of those used by JUMP systems. Social Bicycles subsequently created the JUMP brand for their electric bikes and were then bought by Uber.

It remains to be seen if the fees increase will dent the popularity of the system, and whether it will cause a shift towards being more tourist used – a less price sensitive segment. Any weekend/weekday t/b/d change should be detectable in due course.