TRICS Consortium Limited is pleased to announce the date and location of our 5th annual TRICS Training & Development Forum, after a wait of nearly four years (our first such event since 2019).

This event is being held at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham, on Tuesday 20th June 2023. Registration will commence at 10:30 for a start at 11:00, and the event will close at 15:00.

This is a separate event to our annual TRICS User Meeting (that taking place in November from 2022 onwards with the Training & Development Forum now becoming a June event). Whilst the User Meeting is always held in London, the Training & Development Forum is held regionally in a different part of the UK on each occasion, reflecting the diverse office locations of the TRICS Community. This is also a slightly different event to the User Meeting in that it is more oriented towards the technical day to day operational side of the TRICS system. It is an event where we discuss the use of TRICS and its components and data more than at the User Meeting, which tends to be more wide-ranging across the project as a whole and covering associated transport-industry topics. To give everyone a flavour of what will be discussed at this year’s Training & Development Forum, we have pencilled in the following presentations, which are of course subject to possible amendment.

• Demonstration of Recently Added TRICS System Features
• TRICS System Developments for December 2023 and the TRICS 8 Redesign
• The 2023 and 2024 TRICS Data Collection Programmes
• The 2023 TRICS Good Practice Guide
• TRICS SAM Surveys and the Updated Travel Plan Monitoring Report Feature
• Trip Generation at Fast-Food Drive-Through Developments and Research Update
• TRICS Development: Open Forum

As per the User Meeting, the TRICS Training & Development Forum is free to attend for one person from each TRICS-licensed office, with additional places for attendees from the same user office charged at £175 + VAT (this fee would also apply to any non-TRICS member organisations per attendee). Tea and coffee will as usual be provided at registration, and attendees can mix in the usual way and exchange their thoughts and ideas over a buffet lunch. Unlike the User Meeting, there will be no optional “breakout” session in the afternoon, with all presentations and discussions taking place in a single room. For those wanting to look up the location of the National Justice Museum, it is in the south of the centre of Nottingham and is easily accessible, being only a 10-minute walk from Nottingham railway station.

Therefore, please save the date in your calendars if you are interested in attending. We will be working on the booking system soon, and will send out a further email to everyone once this is up and running so that places can be booked on a first come, first served basis. Myself and the rest of the TRICS team look forward to meeting with our users once again.

TRICS Consortium Limited invites all of its user organisations to participate in our annual TRICS User Survey, which is now live. To access the survey, which should only take a short time, please go to the following link.

2023 TRICS User Survey

As users of TRICS, your opinions are of great value to us. Our annual survey is much more than just a marketing exercise – you can have your direct say in the future of TRICS, its data collection programme, system development and associated projects. It is a very important time for us here at TRICS, as we start to design and implement a major system re-write, TRICS 8. We are also involved in a variety of other projects, so now, more than ever, we need to hear what you have to say about our system, as we strive to improve it in every way that we can.

Over the years, many ideas in response to our user surveys have become actual system improvements, and we want this to continue. We aim to ensure that the whole experience of using TRICS is hassle-free, with an intuitive and user-friendly system that makes your job easier. The best way to do this is through engaging with the TRICS Community, consisting of over 370 organisations across all parts of the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. It is this truly inclusive and interactive way that has seen the system evolve over three decades, and will see it continue to improve and develop through years to come. So please get involved and have your say in the future of TRICS today.

We look forward to receiving your comments and ideas. Thank you for your time, it is greatly appreciated.

TRICS Consortium Limited are pleased to announce that Anne-Marie Kanor has joined our team in the new role of TRICS Project Administrator.

Anne-Marie will be working at an administrative and monitoring level across a variety of elements of the TRICS project, including working with our data collection contractors at various stages of the data collection process (including the management of deadlines and the monitoring of progress), and with our clients commissioning TRICS SAM surveys, as well as being involved in company administration and procedures. The Project Administrator is an integrated role and is designed to enhance the efficiency of the project as we move forwards with increased data collection programmes and greater system development, including work on the new TRICS 8 system.

Anne-Marie will very soon be introducing herself to our suppliers and key contacts, and the team all look forward to working with her.

Some TRICS users have recently been experiencing an unusual “404” error when attempting to log into TRICS at www.trics.org.

The TRICS team has been investigating this, and it would appear that the issue is a result of software updates on our server plus possibly updates to browsers, although there has been no conclusive reason found. To resolve this issue we have made some adjustments to our website which means that cookies are no longer used. This has fixed the problem, but users should be aware of what has changed.

Users will notice that on the logon screen the username field is blank by default. With most browsers. one click into the blank field will show a list of previous login credentials. If users see a “404” error during login they should first try clearing their browser cache. If that does not work they should then try and remove cookies associated with www.trics.org or trics.org. If users continue to see cookies associated with trics.org, it should be noted that these are not generated by our software code but by ASP.NET, to store the current user session ID (which is of course important).

Guidance on how to remove cookies varies by browser type, but on Chrome the instructions (as found through an online search) are as follows:

1. On your computer, open Chrome
2. At the top right, click More : > Settings (note there are three dots shown and not two)
3. Under “Privacy and security”, click Cookies and other site data
4. Click see all cookies and site data
5. At the top right, search for the website’s name
6. To the right of the site, click Remove (dustbin symbol)

If users need any further assistance they should contact their organisation’s IT department.

TRICS Consortium Limited has decided to introduce a new TRICS count type of “scooters” into all surveys undertaken from 2022 onwards.

This new count type will not differentiate between motorised and non-motorised scooters, so will apply to all types (including the smaller ones that children use). In effect, scooters will be treated the same way as we deal with pedal cycles, in that they will be recorded as an independent count type for both Level 1 (traffic) and Level 2 (multi-modal) TRICS surveys. This will mean that the TRICS database system will also be adapted so that trip rate calculations can be undertaken for this new count type just as they currently are for the pedal cycles count (which of course also does not differentiate between pushbikes and electric bikes). Therefore, the introduction of scooters in TRICS surveys should be relatively straightforward.

It is very clear from observation that these scooters are growing rapidly in number and are here to stay in one form or another. As they evolve over time we may be in a position to consider splitting the new count into potential sub-types, but in the first instance we will just cover every type of scooter (excluding the motorbike type which of course continue to be recorded as motorbikes) under one umbrella scooters count.

The December 2021 release of TRICS version 7.8.4 will include all the information that our users will need, with the systems architecture updated along with our Good Practice Guide and Multi-Modal Methodology document. The TRICS Help system will also be updated accordingly with the new count type definition etc.

We welcome your feedback and further suggestions on this topic, as we are opening up an unofficial consultation following this announcement over the next few months before we undertake the necessary systems work. As always, should you have any questions these are warmly welcomed.

TRICS Consortium Limited are pleased to announce the publication of our Guidance Note on the Practical Implementation of the Decide and Provide Approach for future development planning, which is freely downloadable from our website at http://www.trics.org/decideandprovideguidance.html.

This document is the result of a broad and thorough collaborative effort from different planning perspectives, including members of the TRICS team, local highway authorities, the academic profession, the Department of Transport and independent consultants. Now, more than ever, we need to reassess approaches to transport and development planning, and the collaboration behind this project has allowed us to present the idea of the new Decide and Provide approach, whilst also providing strong evidence, using the wealth of historic survey data within TRICS, of trip generation trends over time, which themselves illustrate that the principles behind this new approach are grounded in hard data. It has become clear from our analyses that there has been a reduction in vehicular trip generation over time for key land uses, and that we should adapt the TRICS system and introduce new elements into its analytical features to allow a new type of trend interrogation of the database, whilst keeping TRICS a vital and integral part of assessing future trip generation estimates.

For over 30 years TRICS has been instrumental in our planning processes, and as an organisation we are very pleased to be playing our own important role, along with our collaborative partners, in addressing one of the most important questions in transport and development planning today. The work that has been undertaken has shown that TRICS will continue to be a fundamental element of the new Decide and Provide approach. We have always been an organisation that can adapt and evolve over time and participate in addressing important issues with the experience of our team in trip generation analysis, data collection programmes, system development and research, and forward thinking. We are ready and willing to make the necessary changes and to show our users how TRICS could be used alongside the new Decide and Provide approach, providing essential guidance which has started with the publication of this document. We need to make it clear that publication of this document should be regarded as the first stage of this journey. There is plenty more work to do, and we look forward to more of our users and other organisations coming on board to join our growing collaboration towards a new future for development planning that aims to face the industry’s (and the nation’s) challenges head on with positive solutions.

There will be a great need for a new environmental approach as we emerge from the pandemic, especially when it comes to the decarbonisation of transport. We live in an uncertain world, and the question of uncertainty can clearly be extended to transportation and the future of development planning. The new Decide and Provide approach embraces that uncertainty, and offers a clear and distinct method for how the practices of our industry should and can change, and TRICS intends to be leading the way in terms of providing practical and solid survey data analysis solutions. Through an extended period of discussion, data analysis and application of ideas that are firmly rooted in the challenges that lay ahead, we can all implement a new forward-thinking approach to development planning and Transport Assessments fit for the 21st Century.

We look forward to receiving your much welcomed feedback and to working with you all in making these changes happen.