| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:New Traffic Measures are Harming Your Town | |
| Posted by: | Tom Pike | |
| Date/Time: | 04/08/20 09:36:00 |
| Barnes Community Association used comparisons of MasterCard payments, one year before closure compared to one year after. Mastercard certainly has more objective and quantifiable information than the sentiment of individual traders, and that's why BCA used this data. For this period: London as a whole: 9% increase in MasterCard sales Hammersmith, W6: 13% increase Barnes, SW13: 21% increase Those are the facts. There could have been an overall increase in credit card sales compared to cash, and an overall boost to the west London retail, so it's probably best to use the 8% difference between Hammersmith and Barnes as a indicator of the relative growth in retail in Barnes after the closure. There's no reason to think there'll be a difference if cash or Visa were used instead of MasterCard - they're just different ways of sampling overall sales. As for causation, it's possible that other factors apart from the bridge closure might have been responsible for the relative growth in sales, but it's not obvious what they might be. What is clear is that the closure of the bridge is associated with an increase in retail sales in Barnes, and the suggested reason is simple as explained in the BCA article: the bridge closure led to more Barnes residents shopping locally, more than making up for the loss in through trade. |