A few Worcester(shire) based statistics, facts and figures

Here at Bike Worcester HQ we're a big fan of making use of information and data to help inform our own views, and then to communicate that to a wider audience. Getting information to answer a question almost always prompts another question, or sparks further enquiry along a different path. Over the years we've unearthed some excellent statistics and data, and we end up with little factoids that are interesting, great for dropping into a conversation at an appropriate time, but don't really have a home elsewhere in our collection of blogs. Some of this ahs been discovered on t'internet, other stuff is via Freedom of information requests to Worcester City Council and Worcestershire County Council, so a big thank you to the hard working officers for their efforts in providing the information requested. We use the website What Do They Know for managing our requests.So here we are, a home for lost facts and truth nuggets. Feel free to disperse them into the world as you see fit. Oh, and comments are open if you want to ask a question, and we will endeavour to find the answer, or if you can point us at some other interesting information we can include in the post. 

How many people live AND work in Worcester?

I was asked this question by Ned Boulting, yep, him of Tour de France commentary fame, and 33.3% of the Streets Ahead Podcast. I couldn't answer it at the time, so I went a looking for the answer. The best I could get was from the Worcester City Strategic Housing Market Assessment 2019, which contains the following information for the city:Number of houses: 45,400, workers: 47,018, who work in Worcester: 29,042 (61.8%), + another 4967 (9.9%) live in Malvern and work in Worcester.So in 2019 there were 29,042 people who both lived and worked in Worcester, which is 61.8% of the total number of workers. Lots of opportunities for active travel right there, baby! 

How many children go to school in the city?

Part of the same conversation with Ned I think I put a number to this one...lots. According to the Mainstream School Sufficiency Report 2020 we were at 8107 primary pupils, and 5466 secondary pupils (I think this excludes Private Schools). I wasn't able to get a figure for how many live and are schooled in the city, but I'm going for...lots. 

How many cars are there in the city?

My source for this is a Worcester News article here, with 55,593 car registrations for city addresses as of December 2020, which equates to 1 car for every 1.4 adults. This has increased from 50,000, or by 10% in the 10 years previous. Based on UK average car size these take up the same area as 60 football pitches. 

But everyone drives, right?

Wrong. The 2021 census has a very useful dataset which is available in map form here. The data reports that 20.5% of households in Worcester don't have access to a car or van. In the city centre there are a number of areas that this percentage is over 60%. Doesn't really seem fair that we appear to have focussed our efforts on designing the city centre for moving cars around, when the majority of people living there don't have access to a car or van, right?

Say no to 15 minute cities...!

A 15 minute city is an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any point in the city. That's not me writing that, all plagiarised from Wikipedia. Sounds idyllic. So I say YES to 15 minute cities, and the kicker is we already live in one! If you look at the wonderful Travel Time Map, centre on Worcester and let it work out your range in 15 minutes on a bike, it covers the vast majority of the city. We just need to enable and encourage more people to try making some of those journeys within the city without using a car, and as Hot Chocolate sang in 1978, everyone's a winner baby, that's the truth.

Cycling infrastructure in Worcestershire

This one came via an FOI to the County Council. I was interested to know how many kilometres of road, footway and segregated cycleway they're responsible for maintaining, not least because I wanted to know how much segregated cycleways there were (because I know of precious little of it). So there's 4177 km of roads, and 3357 km of footways. With regard to cycleways there is apparently 207 km of on road (I don't know what constitutes an on road cycleway; I certainly hope it doesn't include a road with a bike painted on it), and 139 km off road (including shared use with pedestrians).What about segregated cycleways, as in, just for use by bikes, like you see in other UK cities? Well, County doesn't have any data on this. I'm aware of 3 sections in Worcester, totalling maybe 300 metres in length (hit the comments if you know where this is, or of any other I've missed). Is it possible this is in fact the total for the whole County? So there you have it. Facts. Lovely facts. I'm off to run a fact bath and have myself a little wallow.