View Grit bin locations in a larger map
Following last night’s snow-fall I thought it might be worth re-publishing the locations of grit-bins in the borough.
The Google map details where they all are (roughly, but they are big yellow things, so I’m confident it gives more than enough information for you to find them) but if you want more information you can find it in the council’s winter service plan (PDF).
Just like last year the council has place a number of grit bins around the borough, and I’ve updated the Google map I did of the locations.
Only two or three have moved (I didn’t keep a precise count of changes) so if you had a bin last year the chances are good it is back. And I added a further dozen or so locations to the map.
View Grit bin locations in a larger map
Two health-warnings.
[You can download the data I used to make this map (location, longitude and latitude) from my data page.
View Grit bin locations in a larger map
I’ve updated my map of grit bins now the council has expanded the scheme. The original 20 were well used so there’s another load being dropped around the borough this week.
As before they are placed in areas that are not part of the council’s priority gritting programme, So as before, if there isn’t one near you it isn’t because of some horrible town hall conspiracy, it’s either that other areas are higher risk, or your area is done by the council directly. Of course, it’s not a science – this is the first year we’ve done this and are learning as we go so placements will be refined over the months and years.
I will relate one anecdote from the last lot of snow. Although these could be seen as a ‘Big Society’ initiative, I was intrigued by the Nudge aspect. I was the first on my stretch of road to grit, doing the area outside my house and a couple of neighbours; a day later I counted five others that had done the same, all on that same stretch and all my side of the road. Around the corner or on the other side of the road where you couldn’t see the cleared pavement (because of buildings or cars obstructing the view) and the pavement remained white.
Statistically not significant, though the theory suggests that people are likely to emulate the behaviour of people like them. In this case, gritting outside their homes because one of their close neighbours has.
Which set me thinking about how well received the new grit bins will be, and I think it will be fascinating to see, comparatively, how well used they are (I have no idea how accurately we are logging usage, grit is inexpensive, and the effort of accurate weighing and recording may well quickly dwarf the cost of the grit itself). However, there are two which I think would be interesting to compare usage with bins in areas of street properties.
Nightingale Lane. This box has been placed outside some flats (I think the legally famous Hightrees House) and I wonder how that will play with the shared entrance and exit. With street properties it’s fairly clear which neighbour has cleared their frontage, but with flats? Will nudge work here, or will people assume it’s someone else who isn’t like them making the effort (perhaps someone from the council or the management company).
Bellevue Road. This box is at the bottom of the footpath on the bridge over the railway line, and isn’t that close to residential properties. The nearest are on the other side of the bridge, while the other sides of the road are Wandsworth Common and The Hope pub. The nudge example I gave, therefore, would only work if people saw someone gritting and recognised them.
[I produced the map using the council’s location list, Google maps and for some addresses Steve Morse’s address converter. You can download the list from my data page. Obviously any errors are mine.]
View Grit bin locations in a larger map
The response to my mapping of grit bins last week has fascinated me. Of course, the overwhelming majority of people totally ignored it, but some appreciated it and it was rather flattering to be picked up by the LGIU, and even more so to have been highlighted by the webmaster of Lichfield (who is a real pioneer of open data).
But more interesting was the negative response. I cannot deny the bins are located in the north of the borough. And a few people immediately realised why: it’s because a few weeks ago, when the locations were chosen we all got together in a smoky room (we used artificial smoke, so as not to break the smoking ban) and decided that we’d totally ignore poor old Tooting. Then we guffawed, well, most of us did, some went for the muah-ha-ha-ha evil laugh.
Actually, it wasn’t like that at all (although thank-you to Paul Clarke for the inspiration in his insightful post on the snow and ice in Croydon). Instead it was an operational decision. If you know the area you’ll also realise that there is a strong correlation between the how steep the roads are and how many bins there are.
What particularly interested me is that, as far as I can tell, no-one made the accusation that there was some anti-Tooting (or anti-Labour) bias until I’d made the map. Several even used my map to prove their point, because if we were allowing politics to decide the location the first thing a Conservative council executive member would do is create and publicise a map to highlight the point!
There is inequality in the location of bins because there is inequality of terrain. Only if the borough were perfectly flat would perfectly even distribution make sense. That’s not to say the current distribution is perfect because nothing is, and the lessons from this winter’s placement will be learned and used when choosing placement for next winter. But even with that inequality, even with the imperfection that comes from constantly learning, I’d argue what we’ve got is massively better from the only way to get equality: having no bins so everyone got precisely nothing.
What conclusions can we draw? A very clear one is that people respond to data depending on how it’s presented. The grit bin locations had been well publicised, but drew little attention until put into a map on my website. I know for a fact that my website gets far far less traffic than the council website, but for some reason the map had greater traction than the list.
A second conclusion is that when presented with data, people will draw their own conclusions. To me it was quite clear that the major factor in location choice were steep roads, to others there was a socio-economic or political motivation (there are so many bins in my ward that if it were an indicator of power I’d be something like a local government demi-God rather than mundanely just representing a ward with a hill in it) and I’m sure there are all sorts of other interpretations you can draw.
But the third is that it can provoke the discussion and debate. The challenge is creating a culture in which we can use that constructively, recognising that there is no such thing as a perfect solution, recognising that not everyone gets what they want and also recognising that there’s a difference between policy and operations. On things like this, we want to get it right, providing the data on what we are doing and how we are doing it gives everything the chance to help us do just that.
It’s that time of year when the weather dominates council life. We have been out gritting for days (since Saturday morning to be precise) both priority road routes and pavements.
By far the hardest job is gritting pavements, mainly because these have to be done manually. The council concentrates on priority areas for pavement gritting, for example outside schools, stations and clinics and, because they have to return to these areas often do not get around to many residential streets. To help residents 20 grit bins have been located in various places around the borough (the council don’t seem to have mapped them, so I have).
View Grit bin locations in a larger map
The council’s website is hosting a cold weather update page that has the latest updates.
The location data for this is now on my data page.
