What's been measured is fairly basic. It's how many vehicles pass this point, in a number of locations. Those numbers, and the dates on which they were measured, have now been published.
The analysis that has been applied to them is not hugely complex or sophisticated. The outcome is that they simply don't show what has been pushed as a major, claimed downside of the scheme - large amounts of traffic getting displaced onto peripheral roads.
I don't actually see how you could spin the numbers to claim that. To be honest, I am a bit surprised by them - I might have expected them to show a moderate increase on many of the peripheral roads, and that I would be saying this is anticipated in the short term and we need to wait for the next stage of assessment before making kneejerk reactions. But in fact they show significant reductions in some places, and all of the increases are rather modest.
Everything is hugely complicated by the Covid impact of course - but the measurements were taken during a period where traffic in London generally had returned to levels close to what was the norm before, and the method they have used to adjust for this seems uncontroversial to me.
What alternative methods of assessment and analysis do you think prior consultation would have come up with? They seem to be using quite a conventional approach. The results are not the product of mathematical gymnastics - they are just simple counts of vehicles passing a location.
There are two further stages to come and we are yet to see how the picture looks at those points; I would say that any optimism at this stage should be cautious.
