TRICS Consortium Limited are delighted to confirm that we have a date and venue booked for our 25th annual TRICS User Meeting in Central London, which will be our first user event since 2019.

This event will be taking place at the Vue Cinema in Leicester Square on Tuesday 27th September 2022. It is a great venue with state of the art facilities, and we have booked two cinema screens (one for the main meeting and the other for the breakout session in the afternoon). As per previous events, bookings will be available on a first come first served basis, with each user office able to send one attendee free of charge, with a buffet lunch provided.

We already have a great programme lined up, which will include the following:

• Developing TRICS through 2020-2022
• A review of the TRICS SAM survey approach for the 2023 programme (Travel Plan Working Group)
• Decide & Provide (the way forwards and how to develop your approach)
• Technical analyses (trip rate variation in petrol stations and trip rate variation across Residential sub-categories)
• TRICS system demonstration and the TRICS Open Forum (breakout session options)

Registration on the day will commence at 0930, and the event will close at 1530.

We are now in the process of setting up our online booking system, and once this is running we will let everyone know. This event is expected to be popular, so when you do have the opportunity we advise you to book early to avoid any potential disappointment. Until then, please put Tuesday 27th of September 2022 in your calendar, and we look forward to welcoming the TRICS Community to our events again after too long a wait. It promises to be a good day for everyone.

The deadline for the commissioning of new TRICS SAM (Standardised Assessment Methodology) surveys to take place in the remainder of the 2022 Spring survey window is noon on Thursday 14th April 2022.

Please note that after this deadline, any requests for SAM surveys will be for surveys that are to take place in our Autumn survey window, which will run from September, when the schools return from their Summer holidays, until the end of November.

Our TRICS-approved data collection contractors require a reasonable amount of lead time to prepare for our surveys, as does the TRICS team, so we need to put these deadlines in place to ensure that the two data collection windows remain viable and that we deliver all of the commissioned surveys in a reasonable timeframe.

TRICS Consortium Limited are very pleased to inform all members of the TRICS Community that we have decided to freeze our annual licence fees for the third year in a row.

As our industry emerges and begins to recover from a difficult couple of years, we have seen use of TRICS increase to record levels, with 2021 also being an incredibly busy year for client-commissioned TRICS SAM surveys. We recognise that times have been hard for many within our community, and so we want to recognise this by not increasing the licence fees for use of TRICS in 2022, which we hope will encourage further use of the system and engagement in its development from our users. The only fees that will see a modest increase in 2022 are for use of the Bureau Service, to cover inflation and the increasing amount of work undertaken by our team. This of course means that obtaining a full TRICS licence becomes a more cost effective option in the longer term (an option that many of our Bureau Service users have taken up over the years).

The current 2021 TRICS licence fees are shown here http://www.trics.org/membership.aspx, so you will see no changes to these as we move through 2022.

There are many things to look forward to in 2022, including the long awaited return of our annual User Meeting in London and our Training & Development Forum at a regional location (watch this space for announcements), and the development of TRICS 8, which was put on hold in 2021 due to the need to get our full data collection programme back up and running (and also due to the unusually high demand for SAM surveys that were put on hold by clients last year, which have dominated proceedings in recent months). We are also looking to add a new member to the TRICS team, so that we can hit the ground running in 2022 and successfully deliver all elements of the project, including a bigger regional data collection programme across all parts of the UK and Ireland.

As always, we look forward to working with you all and to receiving your much valued feedback and ideas, as we move towards what will be a very important year.

2021 has seen a high demand for commissioned TRICS SAM surveys. It has been good to get this process back up and running following the suspension of surveys in 2020, with many surveys having taken place, and numerous requests for surveys in the autumn window continuing to come through to the TRICS team.

Please note that the deadline for new TRICS SAM survey commissions for the Autumn 2021 window is noon on Friday 24th September 2021. After this date, any new surveys will need to be added to the Spring 2022 window which commences next March. The TRICS team have been working hard to accommodate client requests for commissioned surveys in what continues to be a very busy year, but we have to allow reasonable lead time for our TRICS-approved data collection contractors, especially for more complex and resource-intensive survey sites.

All SAM survey clients should also be aware that any new surveys added to our current list prior to the 24th of September deadline will need to move swiftly through all stages, including the signing of survey agreements and the authorisation of surveys (including the raising of purchase orders) once our quotes have been provided, to ensure that the surveys can take place in the remaining timeframe of the Autumn window. Any significant delays through the process will mean that it is likely that surveys will need to be moved to the Spring 2022 window or removed from our records.

We look forward to continuing to work with all of our TRICS SAM survey clients through this year and into the next.

Having had internal discussions, TRICS Consortium Limited has taken the decision to cancel the 2021 TRICS User Meeting, which was due to be held in Central London on 28th September.

We did have the option of holding the event with social distancing measures and reduced capacity restricting it, and this was followed by an offer of the meeting being a “pilot event” without these restrictions in place, but having discussed this all in more detail we made the decision to fully cancel the event, as we deemed conditions to be too risky given the rapidly increasing coronavirus cases in the UK and the uncertainty this would bring. Add to this the fact that we were getting closer to the event’s date (just over two months away at the time of us making this decision), and the fact that a significant number of people may not have been comfortable about travelling in and out of Central London at peaks times in such conditions, and in the end we felt it was a practical and sensible decision to make. It should also be noted that some commentators have been talking of the possibility of the current increase in coronavirus cases going on until possibly September. We also feel that any online version of our events just wouldn’t work the same way, as we get so much from the interactions between attendees in addition to providing the presentations, so we would rather wait a bit longer and then get back to our events the way they should be when the time is right.

Moving forwards, we fully intend to resume our annual Spring and Autumn events, but we have decided that we will only proceed with them once everything has come under control in the UK. We shall only recommence planning our events once we are as sure as we can be that we would not need to postpone them again, so for the time being we shall go into 2022 and assess things in the first instance at that point, with a view to one or both events taking place next year, without being committed to any timescales as things currently stand. We will of course continue to update everyone as to how things progress.

We are all disappointed that we have had to cancel our event, but we are looking forward to better times and at last resuming our regular gatherings of the TRICS Community that provide so much great value and feedback.

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.