richardjay wrote:
Even if we assume that the vehicles in Liverpool, Sefton, and Knowsley to some extent service St Helens Halton (Runcorn) and Wirral there is a vehicle for every 133 people in the Liverpool City Region and one for every 353 people in Bristol. Why, ideas?
Funnily enough, I recall looking at the Bristol numbers some years ago, and thinking vehicles there on the low side, while Merseyside tending to be on the high side (of course, Sefton always misleading as Delta has historically operated across Merseyside, but if you look across Merseyside as a whole then that inconsistency should be ironed out, as you seem to be suggesting. Of course, in the days of Uber, Sefton cars are operating even further afield than Merseyside, but I've no idea whether that's 'statistically significant' or not).
Then there's the likes of Bradford, which seems to have a population not much bigger than Bristol's, but around double the number of licensed vehicles.
Then, of course, there's Wolverhampton in particular, which is off the scale as regards cross-border working, so no real point looking at the figures there at all. Of course, analyses have been done of drivers' addresses to try to work out where they're actually working that way, but that's not foolproof either, as the story at the top of the thread indicates.
But cross-border living and working has always been a problem as regards analysing the numbers, particuarly in large urban areas where maybe drivers more likely to live outside the council area where they work, and offices more likely to cover conurbations which encompass several local authorities.
Mr T/RichardJay wrote:
I looked at Bristol as it is a southern city comparable in size to Liverpool but it has no neighbouring conurbation which feeds it...
On the other hand, Wikipedia states:
"With
a population of 463,400, it is the most populous city in South West England. The wider Bristol Built-Up Area has the 10th-largest population in England.
The urban area population of 670,000 is the 11th-largest in the United Kingdom."
Wiki also states Bristol's Metro population (metropolitan area) as being over one million
Of course, that maybe suggests that Bristol is even more under-supplied by licensed vehicles than your figures indicate. On the other hand, these urban and metro populations will include several council areas. So who knows what's going on there in terms of where vehicles are licensed, and where offices are operating from. For a start, Bristol Airport is in the North Somerset council area.
And there are plenty other details that could be relevant, such as singled/doubled cars (the prevalence of which varies from area to area) and the proportion of full-time/part-time drivers, which again varies between locations.
Even the published figures can be unreliable - there's certainly more detail in the DfT figures these days, but when I looked closesly at these things in the past, there were plenty of obvious anamolies and errors, such as double counting dual badges, and published vehicle numbers way in excess of driver numbers.
So all a potential minefield and rabbit hole for any kind of anaylsis. Which is why I said recently that I couldn't really see the point of PHTM publishing the vehicle and driver numbers in its analysis of Covid grants. To be of even any use as regards the point you're making, they'd have had to publish population figures as well.
Likewise, the figures for grants that they published didn't make it clear if they were for drivers or vehicles, so a bit pointless also publishing driver and vehicle numbers.