A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities replicates an earlier tap/fill finding on a different Facilities dashboard, and finds EV-charging bollards counted as in use by drivers who parked to hold the bay, not to draw power.
A deliberate replication of an earlier tap/fill finding shows drivers reserving bays, not drawing power, behind next year's expansion case
Next year’s business case for more EV-charging bays rests on one figure: how often the University’s eighteen bollards report themselves in use. A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities checked whether that figure survives a clamp meter, and whether an earlier finding about a different Facilities dashboard would survive a second one.
Dr Fenna Okoro and Dr Ingrid Vasseur fitted eighteen bollards across three car parks with inline current clamps, running them for twelve weeks alongside the dashboard’s own connector-sense log. A bay counted as “utilised” the moment a cable connected; the clamp told a different story. Reservation-only connections, plugged in but drawing under 200 watts, rose from a fifth to well over half of all logged bay-time across the window, while metered active charging held flat.
The Horizon Register logs what’s coming. This is the first time we’ve had to ask whether what’s coming was ever really there.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register
The replication succeeds and fails in the same result: the pattern from the water-refill study reappears, but not for the same reason. A tap trips a hydration-station counter regardless of whether a bottle fills; a bollard’s cable trips its counter regardless of whether the car behind it is finished, full, or just parked somewhere it won’t move. Dr Vasseur, whose research follows how a scanning exercise’s open questions narrow into an agenda item, called the reservation share “the kind of number a business case would rather round before committee sees it.”
The University reads the result as a useful check ahead of a decision that was resting on an unchecked figure, and expects it to reach committee alongside the expansion case.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.8rf611.