Reflections on 2022

Thoughts on the year gone by and the years ahead

It’s been a whirlwind year. It was my first full year being a dad, I moved house, and got a new job. All this left precious little time for reflection during most of 2022, let alone a write of them. This post rights that wrong! It outlines some of the key things that have happened over the past 12 months in my world, celebrates the successes and, as tradition dictates, speculates on 2023. More prosaically it provides a heads-up on what I’ve been up to.

Like last years reflections I’ll focus on professional/vocational/technical things that I think will be of most interest to people. There are a few personal/family updates worth putting out there also. On every level it’s been an amazing year. Let’s dive in!

Jittering

Much of my work has involved processing origin-destination (OD) data. OD data underlies the highest impact project I have worked on, the Propensity to Cycle Tool (hosted at pct.bike) and follow-on projects1 23. To re-cap, the PCT uses open access OD data representing trips between small administrative zones in England as the basis of a model that estimates cycling potential at zone, desire line, route and, most importantly, route network levels. As outlined in the figure below

Moving house

This last milestone of 2022 was in many ways the biggest. A house is more than just a place sleep: it can be a foundation, a source of strength, a place to call home. So it was a big moment for me and Katy when we got the keys to our new place, on 5th December.

Getting the keys was just the start of the moving process though. Thanks to Leeds City Council, and City Connect which is joining up Leeds’ patchy active travel network, we borrowed an electric cargo cycle, Raleigh’s Pro Electric Cargo Trike. With a 900 litre front carrier, this futuristic machine had the capacity to make our move a lot easier than if we had relied on a car alone.

I’m grateful to CityConnect and encourage anyone needing to regularly shift moderate loads, up to around 100 kg, to do some research into the revolutionary potential of e-cargos to increase the efficiency and fun of moving stuff. You can sign-up for a trial at leeds.gov.uk/evtrials.

References

1.
Lovelace, R. et al. The Propensity to Cycle Tool: An open source online system for sustainable transport planning. Journal of Transport and Land Use 10, (2017).
2.
3.
Lovelace, R., Talbot, J., Morgan, M. & Lucas-Smith, M. Methods to Prioritise Pop-up Active Transport Infrastructure. Transport Findings 13421 (2020) doi:10.32866/001c.13421.
Robin Lovelace
Robin Lovelace
Associate Professor of Transport Data Science

My research interests include geocomputation, data science for transport applications, active travel uptake and decarbonising transport systems