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All you can eat statistics

February 21st, 2018 · Posted by Skuds in Life · No Comments · Life

One of the good things that the UK government does is to make piles of its datasets available on the internet. I find it quite easy to get lost in piles of data, making odd connections or discovering unexpected things. This evening I have been looking at vehicle statistics, which are here.For a start, you can look at tables of all vehicles licensed in the UK by model, or by generic model name. Looking at that, it appears that there are 32.3 million cars registered and 1.5 million of them are Ford Fiestas. In fact, nearly 9% of all the registered cars are either a Fiesta or a Focus. Obviously that is a national thing. Around here it sometimes feels like most cars are huge SUVs. Looking up my own car, I can see that there are 40,428 of them (as at the end of Q3 2017). There were 232,747 Nissan Jukes – or to give the car its full name, the Inexplicably Popular Nissan Juke. It makes me happy to know that there are still officially 13,704 Morris Minors out there, and more Ford Capris than Sierras.

Go into the motor bikes tab and I can see that the scooter I got this month had 2,138 on the road in Q3 last year, which doesn’t sound like many.

Where is gets interesting is looking at the tables that give statistics by local authority area. In there you can see that (as at Q3 last year) there were 51,838 cars registered in Crawley, 16,789 of which were diesels. There were also 4,129 light goods vehicles which were nearly all diesels. All of which goes a long way towards explaining the problems parking in the neighbourhoods, the congestion on the roads and the quality of the air.

At the other end of the pollution scale, there is a table of ‘plug-in’ vehicles where you can see that a whole 102 of those 51,838 cars were electric. That sounds a bit low, but it makes you wonder. The charging infrastructure that we have, such as it is, only has to serve less than .2% of the cars in the town.  If only 1% of car owners went electric then we would need five times as many charging points just to have the same availability.

While there are only 102 electric cars, there are about 3,900 cars registered as SORN. I say ‘about’ because those statistics are not by local authority are but by postcode and there are 3,900 on RH10+RH11. The number is quite surprising too – over 2.3 million cars with a SORN.

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