Welcome to Word on the Street

A Review of London's Street Works.

Overview

Overall, there are around 470,000 completed street works in London every year.

The pace and scale of this activity in our capital is immense and the effects are far reaching.

Whether it be:

• Reparing old gas mains
• Maintaining the water network
• Increasing local electricity supply
• Rolling out full fibre
• Installing EV charge points
• And much more

Absolutely everyone depends on street works in some way shape or form.

That being said, making sense of what goes on can often provoke the follow feeling…

Street Manager as a Data Source

What is the purpose of this review?

I often ask myself the following question:

Can we draw any meaningful insights from Street Manager's open permit data?

My answer to this question is quite simply yes, we can.

My next question is usually:

How do you make these insights actionable rather than just descriptive?

In all honestly, I'm still figuring that bit out.

The review won't be perfect by any means but it will hopefully be of use to some and improve in quality overtime.

Its core focus will be on the impact of street works and ways to reduce disruption.

We'll look at this:

1. On a monthly basis.
2. Cumulatively accross the year (TBC)

This review will be iterative in nature and an analytics roadmap will be produced in the near future.

I am going to attempt a monthly cadence but this is largely dependent on my time.

Current analysis includes:

1. Legacy & Acute borough impact scores
2. Laten borough impact scores

High level roadmap

Future analysis will include:

In 1 month:

1. Collaboration corner
2. Finish and improve the latent impact section

In 2 months:

1. Embedded Streamlit map visualising impact scores using OS Open USRN data.
2. Added road network lengths for each London Borough.
3. Include activity types, not just work categories.

In 3 months:

1. Incorporate Geoplace's SWA code information.
2. Introduce sectoral analysis.
3. Do an edition focused on Works Promoters rather than Highway Authorities.

In 6+ months:

1. Introduce delays analysis.
2. Trend analysis of all impact scores collated so far.

Let's begin!

For a review of last month's street works: Monthly Review

For a review of the year so far: TBC