She doesn’t know it yet but Sarah Rowley has just won a large quantity of whatever coffee and cake she wants …
You see at about 74 minutes in to the October ‘Local Access Forum’ meeting for the Peak District National Park Authority she stood up and talked through some slides.
Not just any old slides.
Slides visualising data that really really matters to ever single resident, visitor, business owner, farmer and policy maker in the PDNPA. Oh, and every kid too, because the facts on that screen will impact and influence anyone growing up in and around the Peak.
And last night 3 blokes sat on Big Moor rewatching the video of the meeting ( watch here ) screaming
‘WE’VE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR CHUFFING YEARS BUT NOBODY WAS LISTENING’ at the screen.
We 3 blokes are out and about at healthy and unhealthy hours of most days of the year on the Eastern Moors and we’ve been proclaiming the new normal of visitation for years. But nobody listened …
Vistor data from trails in the NP that have counters on them. Note the ‘normal’ spike of busyness in Summer. Note the impact of Covid in 2020.
The grey line is derived from anonymised visitor data from phone pings. There isn’t a ‘quiet’ season. Visitation is relentless all year round.
The Hope Valley is getting absolutely unsustainably smashed by visitation. But look at the blue line. A relatively small pocket of land on the E margin of the Park is attracting enormous levels of visitors. Also note that it’s not seasonal there. More on that later…
Strava hot spots for the whole NP are the Great Ridge and the Eastern Moors. Gold dust data.
The positives and negatives of visitation in the Park as garnered by traditional visitor engagement questionnaires.
Ping data showing the extent of the main areas from which people travel to the Peak.
A few observations …
1 You really really won’t appreciate how important this is to some people that have been screaming in to the unlistening abyss that a sunny February day is busier than an August Bank Holiday on the Eastern Moors.
2 The resourcing of National Parks can no longer be seasonalised. You can’t spread the existing money jam to cover the new fact that visitation (and the positives and negatives thereof) are now full on across all 12 months of the year. National Parks urgently need a LOT more jam.
3 If ‘we’ can get more money to fund the cost of the (anonymised) data access to a finer level then we may be able to do things like observe visitation levels by hour of the day and day of the week in specific places. For those of us engaged in the ‘dark side’ of the Park (e.g. dealing with asbo and criminality at night) we may for example be able to drill down to ask for a data set of eg how many people were in place X between the hours of midnight and 3am …
4 Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the data needs to urgently change attitudes at all levels to the new normal of visitation and evidence the emergency requirement for a sustainable funding model for all National Parks and Protected Landscapes.
Thanks Sarah !!