Off Topic: Happy 150th Birthday to the London Underground

So last week the London Underground celebrated 150 years since the first train travelled from Paddington to Farringdon which means a bonanza of fascinating trivia and awesome variations of that iconic map.

When my dad moved to London to study for a year in 1973, he initially bought a tube season ticket but decided to change it to a bus ticket because (to paraphrase) he found himself climbing down into one hole in the ground and reappearing in another with no sense of where he was. With a bus pass travelling was slower but he could start to remember where things were.

With me it's been almost the opposite (although the line I take most often is the above-ground DLR so I suppose I get the best of both). I remember where things are primarily by their proximity to a tube station and if someone tells me where they live or where their office is based, my first thought is to try and locate it on a tube map.

The Underground is the nervous system of the city and the passenger numbers alone are staggering, over a billion passenger journeys are made each year with 57,000 people passing through Waterloo underground alone every morning rush hour. We complain when trains are delayed, when there's a signal failure or when the Circle line has to stop for five minutes at every. damn. stop making it quicker to walk. But the fact that a patchwork system, assembled over 150 years in fits and starts somehow manages to work as well as it does is surely a minor daily miracle.

And it's becoming more of a miracle as time goes on as London's population rises.

The tube network has been undergoing upgrades for the entire time that I've lived in London (just over 3 years if anyone's curious) to make the service more efficient and ultimately carry more passengers.

But it's hard to see them ever keeping up with demand and at peak times on major lines there are already trains every 2 minutes. Will there ultimately be a train arriving as soon as the previous one leaves, using up every minute of the hour? What happens when even these are full? Do we use longer trains which require longer platforms at every station? How long will it be until the platforms of one station almost join those of the next station?

The problem is that the UK is such a London-centric country that the city will likely continue to grow putting further strain on the system and there seems to be little private sector incentive for companies not to move here. From my own (limited and I suppose also London centric) vantage point, most of the clients my company works for are based in London and most of the companies they work for seem to be based in London. So many people that I know moved to London during the great recession because it was the most likely place for them to find work.

It's like a black hole, sucking more and more people and money in and in a round about way this is why I've always been in favour of public organisations like the BBC moving North. The UK is far, far, far too London centric. Is it any wonder nobody cared about the police commissioner elections because there wasn't one happening in London and therefore the London based media barely covered them?

If there's little chance of the private economy balancing the country a bit then organisations which are at least slightly less susceptible to market forces should be helping to move money and talented people away from places which have no trouble attracting replacements. That's the only way we'll stop the apparent drift toward city statehood that London has been on and ultimately that's better for everyone, particularly those that live here.

About that UKIP number (continued)

Earlier this week I put a quick article on the Opinium website just explaining why we think our UKIP number is frequently higher than others. The link is here but the basic idea was that it's down to the fact that we don't do any sort of political weighting beyond whether people are likely to vote.

Just to explain, weighing means counting some people in a survey as slightly more or slightly less than one so that the overall demographics (i.e. the proportion of men vs. women or the percentage of the sample coming from each region) match up with those of the country as a whole.

Opinium figures are weighted to national demographics (that we use in all our commercial polling work as well) and then filtered to those who said they would be likely to vote and told us which party they would vote for.

Filtering to those likely to vote is our way of making sure that we aren't giving prominence to the views of people who aren't going to vote anyway but most other companies also apply a form of political weighting to make sure of this. This either takes the form of asking people how they voted in 2010 and making sure it matches the proportions of that election or giving more or less weight to peoples' answers depending on whether they voted before or not.

The other thing is that, like most companies I think, to see UKIP as an option you have to have said you'd vote for "some other party". In theory surely we'd get the most accurate results by showing the options as they appear on a ballot paper (like Survation do) but the argument against this is that presenting the other parties equally gives them a degree of false prominence given that an actual election will come at the end of a campaign dominated by coverage of the bigger parties. We can't predict what the 2015 campaign will look like exactly but it seems unlikely that UKIP will get as much coverage as they did for the last few weeks of 2012.

Anyway, our approach has worked well in the past and we're confident it's accurate now but we are experimenting with a number of different methods, particularly with forms of political weighting and turnout filtering, to see where we can improve it in the future.

Regional figures don't matter!

On a side note, there was some cheering in UKIP circles at the news that the purple party apparently pulled ahead of the Conservatives in the North West. I haven't checked the exact poll in question but it's worth pointing out that regional splits in national polls are best ignored, particularly for political ones. The sample size is much smaller and the margin of error therefore much higher.
The sample is also designed to match the country's demographics at a national level but may not match those of each region if that makes sense. Put more simply, we make sure that there are the right proportion of, say, 35-54 year olds in the sample but it's perfectly possibly that there will be too many of these in one region and too few in another. The only reason regions are included are because it's standard practise but the figures within them are indicative only and far more prone to being outliers.

UPDATE: I've checked and UKIP and the Conservatives both have 28 people selecting them in the North West. UKIP are on 18% and the Conservatives 17%. This is difference is due to weighting and certainly not significant in any way.