At a packed hustings for the Brighton & Hove ward of Queens Park, residents dislike of council proposals for Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) led to a brief but very fraught exchange between candidate Mark Strong (a traffic data professional) and myself (I’m standing as a Independent). It was one of those ‘yes it is’ ‘no it isn’t’ arguments that had to be set aside at this meeting because there simply wasn’t time for debate. [I must pause to thank St Luke’s Residents Association for organising this hustings and commiserate with them that only 3 out of the 7 candidates had the decency to attend]
Green Party candidate Mark Strong said this:
“I’m a transport planner and use data all the time. The data shows that the roundabout has the highest level of killed and seriously injured…”.
(Mark Strong, speaking to residents at the SLRA hustings April 24th 2023)
This assertion of fact chimes with the council’s official response offered to the press last year:
“This junction remains the most dangerous in the city and reductions in accidents remains a central component to the business case”.
(Brighton & Hove News: June 26 2022)
This statement followed a question to committee from Independent councillor Bridget Fishleigh noting how the council continually repeat a myth about the roundabout being the most dangerous junction in the city and one of the most dangerous roundabouts in the country. At the same committee meeting on June 21st, Green councillor Steve Davis, who chaired the session doubled-down on the councils preferred truth:
“It is, without doubt, the most dangerous roundabout in the city. I can say that as a resident. I can say that as a member of the committee and a driver.”
The question of how clever it is to remove the Aquarium roundabout (the small roundabout on the A259 opposite the Palace Pier) and replace with traffic lights triggered a standoff between residents/traders and the council in 2019 that has never been resolved. The Labour council and transport officials argued that removal of the roundabout was necessary in the context of realising their active travel vision for the Valley Gardens area. However, the claim the council made then and the Green administration continues to make is that the roundabout is so dangerous removal is a no-brainer.
Last June, when I brought this question to the ETS committee (see p5 of the September 20th minutes), the response from Green Party Councillor Jaimie Lloyd was contemptuous. For Cllr Lloyd the matter had been settled and the facts hopefully end this debate “as it’s really getting quite boring”.
My question had echoed an earlier FOI request asking to be sent … “any evidence the council holds to suggest the Aquarium Roundabout is one of the UKs (or even Brighton’s) most dangerous roundabouts or in fact any more dangerous to road users and pedestrians than numerous traffic light junctions?”
The council accepted that “references had previously been made about the danger of the junction in a
national context [ ] based on a journalist’s independent analysis” (an analysis, I might add, contradicted by another Daily Mirror report last year in which the Aquarium roundabout does not feature). However, the council then doubled down on the ‘most dangerous junction’ assertion by stating:
“The council’s own past and recent analysis of data for the city has shown that, out of 81 sites which included a number of traffic signal junctions, the roundabout had the highest number of collisions during those periods”.
And so my follow-up question to ETS was this:
“[The assertion] that the Aquarium Roundabout has one of the highest number of collisions in the city is false. No amount of slicing and dicing the stats can alter the fact that the roundabout through which 18 million journeys are made every year has entailed zero fatalities and an average of five injuries per year since March 2000. Rather than impart false facts to this committee would it be better that the Chair and Green Party try to stick to the environmental arguments for Phase 3?”
In other words (and its really only a GCSE level point) to answer this question vehicle flow-rate data must be factored-in. Determining how dangerous a junction is requires an analysis of risk. As the Road Safety Foundation state:
“The risk is calculated by comparing the frequency of road crashes resulting in death and serious injury on every stretch of road with how much traffic each road is carrying. For example, the risk on a road carrying 10,000 vehicles a day with 20 crashes is ten times the risk on a road that has the same number of crashes but which carries 100,000 vehicles”.
When this roundabout was last assessed by the council it had an average yearly flow-rate of 18.25 million vehicles. Of those handful of accidents that took place none were fatal and many were slight injuries on approach roads away from the roundabout itself and involving cyclists. With cyclists re-routed the argument for roundabout replacement based on it being excessively dangerous vanishes. Indeed, one might point to the roundabout and describe it as one of the city’s safest junctions. All the serious injury accidents (including fatalities) have occurred at other junctions.
Moreover, the council’s own consultants for the project (Mott Macdonald) warned them of significant “journey disbenefits” (aka traffic jams) once the traffic light T-Junction is in place.
So why is this matter so important to Queens Park ward and this election?
A schoolboy-level misunderstanding of traffic-flow is damning enough of our well-paid council executives (and certainly damning of teacher and transport professional Jamie Lloyd) but to sweep aside all attempts to correct it suggests something far more sinister. It begins to look like a lie deliberately repeated in the hope that it maintains its hold while gaslighting critics as either fools or malign forces of some sort.
After the hustings I asked Mark Strong if he agreed that our dispute over what is or is not a fact concerning the dangers of the Aquarium roundabout needs an immediate clarification. He agreed that we should go head to head on this if only via an email exchange where we present our different readings of the data. I’m certainly happy to be proved wrong (and in this sense I’d concur with Cllr Lloyd that the debate, inasmuch as there is a debate, is really getting quite boring). Mark later clarified that he’d prefer to discuss who is right or wrong on the matter after the May 4th election.
It matters, though, because the voters of Queens Park ward, already concerned about ill-conceived LTN proposals that make traffic congestion worse and disadvantage residents and traders in a host of ways, are left perplexed by two candidates clashing over fact. If I’m correct (and if Mark Strong accepts that I’m correct) then the whole city needs to know that our party administrations (Labour and Green) have hid behind a lie. It is indeed baffling that the Green Party (advised by high paid officers) would not have concluded it far better to stick with the truth.
The truth about the consequences of roundabout removal had previously been openly and innocently stated by at least one Green councillor back in 2019. After listening and nodding to my points on traffic flow-rate he leaned toward me as if revealing a secret and said “its all about traffic evaporation”. The unspecified period of “journey disbenefits” that consultants warned of is in fact exactly the outcome Greens are so relaxed about. This is because they feel certain that making life miserable for motorists will cause car journey’s abandoned and a switch to better forms of transport like walking or cycling.
Leaving that dream aside, the vital issue at hand that residents like me want addressed is have Brighton’s Greens got trapped inside a big fat lie? (aside from their sales patter on LTNs, ULEZ and Net Zero that is). And why would anyone vote for a party (sorry Labour, this means you too) that would knowingly engage in falsehoods in order to ‘sell’ us their policies? The gold medal for Green Party councillors playing fast and loose with the truth was previously held by former mayor Cllr Pete West who, excited by the Daily Mirror’s league table, said this to the Argus in September 2019: “Just last week the Department of Transport released figures showing that this roundabout ranks among the top 20 most dangerous in the UK”. Yet, that same week the DfT confirmed “The Department for Transport does not have a leader board for the most dangerous roundabouts in Great Britain” and told me that I “need to discuss the methods with the analytics team who made this assertion”. It seems Pete West may have to hand the gold medal over to the Green Party’s data expert Mark Strong. What’s that old saying about three kinds of lies?
The data:
For anyone interested in drilling down into the data on accident causalities at the Aquarium roundabout there are two sources of information that help. First is my own freedom of information request (FOI 11412385) from August 1st 2022. If you scroll up the page you will find links to documents sent to me that show tables of accident cluster reports compiled by the council.
Flow-Rate
According to the DfT 91.25 million vehicles flowed through this roundabout from 2013-2017 (18.25 million per year). The Road Safety Foundation advise that existing flow data relates to the route so will not include turning movements around the roundabout from the other route. Data on turning counts on the roundabout would help. I have requested this from the council.