Recent & Upcoming Talks

Note: tickets are now on sale! Get yours at store.leeds.ac.uk. Based on demand, I’m running a 2-day course with colleagues teaching modern data science skills for transport planning, focussed on transport planning practitioners and transport planning researchers looking to develop their skills for real-world applications.

Transport models historically rely on limited input datasets, such as ’trip generators’ and simplified networks, leading to biases and blind-spots.

Attending the 22nd Annual Scottish Transport Awards as the Network Planning Tool (NPT) project, which I lead, is nominated for the Most Innovative Project of the Year.

Leading a plenary session at Modelling World 2025 in Manchester, discussing the evolving practices, tools, skills, and mindsets for the next generation of transport modellers.

Transport planning has always been a complex and multi-disciplinary enterprise requiring wide-ranging skills and methods. Like many …

My inaugural lecture at the University of Leeds, discussing my work using data science for future-proof transport planning, key career milestones, and my open, reproducible research approach.

Presentation based on work by me and colleagues on the Network Planning Tool for Scotland (NPT) project, funded by Transport Scotland and delivered in collaboration with Sustrans Scotland.

Presenting new methods and open source tools for active travel planning by mapping, classifying, and integrating diverse street network datasets at GISRUK 2025.

I’m looking forward to learning about the latest developments in transport AI at this event. For more information see the event website.

Transport planning has always been a complex and multi-disciplinary enterprise requiring wide-ranging skills and methods. Proliferating …

Transport planning has always been a complex and multi-disciplinary enterprise requiring wide-ranging skills and methods. Proliferating …

This talk describes the design, features and potential use of the Cycle Route Uptake and Scenario Estimation (CRUSE) Tool for Ireland, …

This is the main annual event of the National Health Service’s data science community. See details at nhsrcommunity.com. Related slides by Dustin Carlino from the Alan Turing Institute can be found online.

The Economics of Low-Carbon Markets workshop, 4-5 September in Oldenburg (Germany), marks 10 years since the event was first held. The presentation is part of “Policy Session” on open compuational tools such as the Propensity to Cycle Tool that have informed policy.

This workshop explores recent development in R’s spatial data analysis ecosystem and exciting new developments in the field. I deliver a 2 part session on ‘Tidy Geographic Data’, and a session on handling large OpenStreetMap datasets with R, osmium and other open source command-line tools.

Abstract ATIP is an open source web app initially developed in early 2023 to enable local transport planners to document, store and share geographic data on planned interventions. As of May 2023 ATIP provides an intuitive interface to quickly sketch the location of a wide range of interventions including:

Abstract This talk will discuss the impacts of making transport models, and the data and tools for decision-making in participatory democracies using open source, accessible, and transparent methods. It will build on recent research into the rapid growth of open source software and open access and participatory transport modelsthat go beyond technologies developed in the 20th Century, using cutting-edge and community-built software to better meet the needs of the 21st.

For the first time an active travel mapathon is being organised in Leeds!

Robin Lovelace is Associate Professor of Transport Data Science at the Leeds Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) specialising in the …

Invited talk to Policy Fellows on how code sharing can increase impact

The Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT) is widely used to provide an evidence base to inform cycling investment. In this training session …

This talk, details of which can be found on the registration web page, my colleague Joey Talbot and discuss our prototype ActDev tool. Developed in collaboration with partners from CycleStreets.net, StreetFocus (and associated organisation PlanIt), and A/B Street, the project pushed the boundaries of what can be done with open data to generate an accessible and actionable evidence base on active travel potential and provision in and around proposed housing developments (and potentially other developments).

The talk explores the concepts, demonstrate some evolving new tools and discuss future avenues of research and development.

I was invited to co-present on the topic of Recent changes in R spatial at the Why R conference which, like many other events, has moved on-line. Event link: meetup.

In place of a planned MUSA Masterclass talk in person, a remote lecture was scheduled via the wonders of new digital technologies, on transport data science. Although not as in-depth as the MUSA Masterclass talk, which has been postponed until April 2021 due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, this talk will give a high-level overview of some of the topics that I will talk about, based on a case study from Leeds, UK, the home of the Institute for Transport Studies.

Keynote talk at SatRdays Newcastle Geocomputation with R: Reproducible Geo* workflows, from getting data to making maps This talk will introduce Geocomputation with R, a new book on R for geographic data.

Keynote lecture for the Northwest Universities R Day, Manchester In this, titled Geocomputation with R: Empower yourself with free software and geo* data, I provide an overview of the evolving landscape for working with geographic data using open source, command-line driven software.

Invited lecture in Chile at the Seminario del Transporte a la Movilidad y Accesibilidad (in Spanish) Title: ICTs para la (ciclo)inclusión Slides (in Spanish)

Plenary lecture at the Cycling & Society conference, Bristol Talk on methods for estimating severance in active transport networks. Slides: Severance, parallels and integration Audio from the talk is available here

This was the finale of a week of research collaboration and teaching at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena Institut für Geographie. During the study visit I also worked on Geocomputation with R with fellow co-author Jannes Muenchow and wrote a tutorial on route network analysis in R that can be found at https://github.

Talk at the Geographic Data Science (GDS) Lab in Liverpool. Slides

Invited keynote lecture

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