York cones off cycle lanes to widen pavements for pedestrians

This article doesn't seem to know what it's reporting:

Quote:

THE number of crashes involving cars and bikes has gone up under lockdown.

Quote:

...the proportion of collisions involving pedal cyclists in the county has risen from 20 per cent to 27 per cent.

These are not the same thing. If you take a load of motor traffic off the roads and add a load of cycle traffic, the proportion of collisions that involve cycles is almost inevitably going to rise, simply because they're a bigger proportion of the road users out there. It doesn't necessarily mean the absolute number of them has changed at all, or even that it hasn't actually gone down.

Other evidence elsewhere might suggest that there has been something of a rise (or at least in those with serious outcomes), but it would be a mistake to think that this statistic means that they have risen by the c.1/3 that might be assumed.

Get proactive - move a few of the cones to block entry to the main lane to motor vehicles - then cyclists can have that all to themselves. 

There has been a massive increase in cycle traffic.

Though the quantity of motor vehicles was heavily down, levels of some speeding has also increased, hugely in some cases, and I don't know if others have also observed this, the numbers of cars is going up almost every day.

There seemed to be a lot of "visiting" last weekend, lots of different cars parked on the residential streets I ride through on my regular mandated exercise ride.

traffic levels whilst not quite back to peak normal, are certainly way up from where they have been IMO, its gone from barely seeing a vehicle at all on my designated exercise outings, to near enough on some of the roads a constant stream of cars, Im often back to waiting at side roads just for a gap to pull out into, 2 weeks ago I could join those roads straight away without even losing much momentum to check it was clear. Notably also the numbers of cyclists have dropped, Im only really seeing what Id term regular cyclists out & about now.

And to add to my assumption the BBC had this under a section

Some have returned to their cars

The weekly troughs in motor vehicle use confused me at first, not going to lie. But now that I recognize them, I have to ask why the other modes in that chart don't share that periodic behavior - or could I just be missing it because of scale?

Possibly indicates that people who work in those essential sectors that keep operating seven days a week are less likely to commute by car? That might chime with the fact that car use has begun to rise again as those less essential workplaces that initially closed have put in place distancing measures and begun to reopen.

but Id presume the motor vehicle traffic is measured via ANPR cameras or some other traffic level monitoring device, though how they collate the data so it doesnt double count would be interesting, but principally Id say its data restricted to only main/major roads where those devices are installed, whilst public transport would just be a pure count of tickets sold.

In this case, I don't think it really matters too much whether there's double counting, since it's looking at current traffic as a percentage of a baseline of the same time a year earlier. So any double counting is likely to have proportionately the same effect on both the baseline and the current count, and therefore little to no effect on the resulting percentage.

Even from the government's own slides and datasets issued to accompany the daily briefings, it doesn't seem to be possible to determine where they've actually got these figures from (beyond Source: Department for Transport), and the DfT site makes no mention of them at all. 

Even if the motor vehicle traffic is missing some local journeys, I'm not sure that that affects the point, since that was about why we don't see troughing in the public transport figures.