As part of Our Streets Chorlton, Open Data Manchester creates monthly bulletins that showcase some of the data being collected for the project, including the work done directly by community volunteers.
Some highlights from July’s data bulletin show that:
- The total number of cars recorded on Darley Avenue in July was 26,229, which is down 6.5% from last month.
- The average morning peak hour for traffic on Darley Avenue was 08:00-09:00 – the average afternoon peak hour was 17:00-18:00.
- Pollution levels throughout July remained low at Darley Avenue and at the junction of Wilbraham Road and Barlow Moor Road – however, Darley Avenue registered one day of moderate air pollution, on 22 July.
From the July data, we can see that there are higher levels of pollution at Darley Avenue than there are at Wilbraham Road and Barlow Moor Road (locally known as Four Banks), despite the latter being a busy interchange and the former appearing relatively quiet. This may be telling us about some of the other factors that can affect air quality, such as weather, or that cars aren’t the only source of air pollution.
You can download and explore the full bulletin here.
What’s next?
As we knew Barlow Hall Primary School would not be open during the summer, we have moved our air-quality sensor to a new location – on Sandy Lane – and so in future bulletins, we aim to include more data from across Chorlton and Chorlton Park.
This will include planned activity on Burrows Avenue and Westfield Road, where we will be conducting more manual traffic counts with our local Data Champions. If you’d like to get involved, we’ll be running another training session on Monday 13 September at 6.30pm. Find our more and register here.
We also run monthly data chats, which are a friendly and informal opportunity to discuss in more depth some of the data about Chorlton outlined here. The next session is on Wednesday 22 September at 7pm and will explore how events like football matches affect traffic levels. Find out more and sign up here.
To find out more visit ourstreetschorlton.co.uk.