Introduction from Leicestershire, UK

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1

Just wanted to say hi, I’m Stefan and I’m trying to get a Telraam network off the ground in Middle England :slight_smile:

Would appreciate any tips on how to convince a Parish Council which is “not responsible for Highways issues” (their words) to fund 10 Telraam S2 devices.

My first point of call was to try and find pricing information about the VivaCity devices which our county council already use. These are more sophisticated and much more expensive versions of Telraam. Apparently the cost is ‘commercially sensitive’ and they wouldn’t tell me.

I’ve since FOIed several other authorities and trawled the WhatdotheyKnow website and my guesstimate is that a one year VivaCity contract costs around £2350 per device. This is based on an FOI request in Sunderland where they paid £26k for 8 devices.

My local county council, Leicestershire, have installed 88 of the VivaCity sensors at a cost of - I suspect - several hundred thousand pounds. Which is great and Leicester is doing a lot for active transport, but none of these devices are deployed in our town/village and traffic is horrendous, not least because the A6 cuts us in half.

I’m doing all this because the main local councillor as well as the Team Manager of the Network Data & Intelligence Team at county council have rubbished Telraam at the first instance citing its ‘flaws’ and ‘not 100% accuracy’. Yet they neither share the data nor pricing for their own devices - how convenient.

Anyways, my plan is to use the Parish Council in the first instance to fund some devices and then use the gathered data to make the case for improvements and to see if any specific measure is successful or not.

Thanks, Stefan

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Welcome to the community @stefan.richter - great to have you here.

Your experience is probably quite common for many campaigning citizens trying to get their local councils to engage around specific areas. It is understandable that a council will have many priorities, but it is a shame that their lack of time means they may not take a moment to appreciate the potential benefits of working together with motivated citizens like you.

Working on this in a positive and collaborative way is most likely to work in the long run though, so we are hopeful that we can help you to provide them with useful data, and maybe get them interested in doing more (and fixing problems in the meantime).

We’ll be gathering in the Community Pitch Group (anyone can join if they want) to discuss this very soon.

Thanks again for the introduction. It is so wonderful to get to know members here better