The article below is excerpted from the Cambridge News website (link at the foot of the page).
Read the article, carry out some calculations and comment on the substance of the article. Some of my ideas follow the article (after a jump).
Where you are most likely to get a
parking ticket in Cambridge
One Cambridge road has seen more drivers slapped with parking
tickets than any other, new data has revealed.
If you park regularly on Chesterton Road, to the north of the city
centre, you may well have seen parking wardens issuing yellow tickets as it is
the number one place to get a ticket in Cambridge.
The fining hotspot was revealed after a Freedom of Information Request by
insurance comparison website comparethemarket.com, which has detailed
an interactive map with its findings.
The data also shows Cambridge was the top city in the East of
England for parking fines, with twice as many handed out in the city over three
months compared to the next ranking area.
Cambridgeshire County Council issued a total of 12,234 penalty
charge notices between July and September 2017, making £281,025 of revenue.
But the region's second parking fine hotspot - East
Hertfordshire - lagged behind with 6,950 fines on motorist's vehicles
generating a revenue of £191,878.
Simon McCulloch, director
at comparethemarket.com said: "Our
parking fines hotspots have revealed that motorists need to be extra vigilant
when it comes to something as simple as parking their vehicle correctly if they
want to avoid a hefty fine. If you do
find yourself with a PCN, it’s worth checking your ticket, as you can often
reduce the fee by half, simply by paying it within 7 or 14 days, depending on
your local council."
The top 10 parking fine areas in
East of England
1. Cambridge (12,234) - £281,025
2. East Hertfordshire (6,950) - £191,878
3. Watford (6,428) - £136,818.69
4. Norwich (5,719) - £171,570
5. St Albans (4,963) - £132,570
6. Colchester (4,791) - £91,220
7. Ipswich (4,551) - £107,044
8. Welwyn Hatfield (3,599) - £79,650
9. Dacorum (2,800) - £90,459
10. Basildon (2,365) - £74,746
Write down comments about the article above before scrolling down to see what I have written.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Here are a few ideas. These are not necessarily complete - there are likely to be other things that can be worked out too.
First of all, it doesn't seem sensible to draw a pie chart (the whole pie would refer to the number of fines or the amount of money from only the top 10 places). A bar chart might show this well. A scatter graph would show the relationship between the number of fines (given in brackets) and the amount of money collected.
It is clear that the ranking has been carried out on the number of fines rather than the amount of money, because the former goes down in order whereas the latter jumps around a bit.
We could work out the correlation coefficient and finding that this is 0.95 we could comment that there is a very strong positive correlation between the number of fines and the amount of money paid in fines. This is perhaps unsurprising.
The 69 pence involved in the Watford total looks a little strange!
The spreadsheet below shows the amount of money per fine. Presumably the 'money per fine' is not a round number in most cases because fines are different in car parks and on the side of the road and because you get a discount if you pay quickly.
This makes the Norwich figure of exactly £30 per fine look a little odd.
I followed the link in the article and found the original data. Here is the section for the East of England:
First of all, this is in alphabetical order of location! Surely actually ranking them would be more sensible?
Then we have the 'location' which, as per the article, is presumably the location with the most fines.
Finally - have a look at the Norwich revenue! This wasn't disclosed for some reason.
The author of the Cambridge News article appears to have decided to assume all of the Norwich fines were £30. I find it a bit galling that they didn't disclose that in the article.
Maybe a better way to do this would be to use the average of the fines in other places, or to look at the highest and lowest and to give an upper/lower bound?
Final problem with this article and this research is that not all the places listed are the same size! It would make sense to factor in the population or the number of cars or the number of visitors rather than using the raw figures.
Oh - and last thought: the first sentence is surely trivially true? Unless there is a tie then it will always be the case that "One Cambridge road has seen more drivers slapped with parking tickets than any other" !
