In this post I look back on 2024 and forward to 2025.

Work-wise, I completed my contract in the Civil Service where I’ve been working for the last 2 years in new government agency Active Travel England

I got a promotion, and, from January 2025, will be back to the relative simplicity of having a single full time job.

On a personal note, I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve become a father again! My wife Katy gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Rosa Lovelace, on Tuesday 12th November 2024. Kit, who was born three years earlier, is being an excellent big brother. While it inevitably led to less free time and some disrupted nights in the final part of the year, it has meant the world to us as a family.

Despite all this change, I’ve still found time to do some fun things outside work and to participate in amazing community projects.

That’s the high-level summary of what I’ve been up to for anyone interested in my exploits in 2024. If you’re really interested, read on!

Working at Active Travel England

My two-year contract at Active Travel England concluded on January 3, 2025, marking the end of a detour in my career. As outlined in a previous post, taking the job in the Civil Service and going part-time at the University of Leeds to enable it was a big decision.

The decision to go part time in both jobs was the right one though: it allowed me to follow through on the belief that publicly-funded researchers owe it to society to ‘give back’. Plus, the differences between academia and the Civil Service are not too big: both are knowledge-based institutions with a focus on evidence and the public good. (In some countries such as Germany, academics are civil servants.)

More specifically, accepting the offer to work part time in a new part of central government, devoted to a topic that I am passionate about, was exciting. It allowed me to build a data and digital team and help shape a rapidly-evolving organisation. Furthermore, I knew that the role in Active Travel England would allow me to work on projects that will have huge impacts for years to come, while continuing to work with outstanding people as part of my main career in academia.

The job at ATE didn’t come out of the blue. I started working for ATE as the Director of Data and Analysis, on an interim basis in 2022. It was a secondment from my role as a 10DS Fellow at the data science team in No 10, which was itself a secondment from the University of Leeds. Clearly, building digital and data science capacity in government was going to be easier to deliver if I was working for government directly. Positive societal impact has always been a key driver for me, and the opportunity to work on the Active Travel England project was too good to pass up.

My proudest achievements in ATE include:

• Setting-up a grant funding agreement between Active Travel England and the Alan Turing Institute (see details at turing.ac.uk and Forbes) enabling the development of new digital tools for more effective transport planning, including planning (see below) and ‘inspectorate’ tools, supplementing the spreadsheet-based Active Travel England design assistance tools.
• Instigating the ‘ATIP’ project hosted at plan.activetravelengland.gov.uk (see open source code at github.com/acteng/atip)
• The SchoolRoutes project, which builds on od2net and the Propensity to Cycle Tool to help local authorities identify and prioritise school routes for investment in active travel infrastructure.

After my experience there, I would recommend working in the Civil Service to anyone who is interested in making a positive impact on society and has the skills to do so, see job opportunities at civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk.

Academic exploits

In 2024 I continued to work on a range of academic projects, with the focus being on the Network Planning Tool for Scotland (NPT), the new BICISCHOOLS project with colleagues at the University of Lisbon, and various ongoing research projects and collaborations.

Highlights included:

• I completed two books on geographic data analysis using free and open-source programming languages for reproducible research. Both are now with CRC Press, available for pre-order, and will be published in 2025.
  • Geocomputation with R (second edition), a major update of the first edition, which was published in 2019.
  • Geocomputation with Python, a new book that builds on the success of the R book and applies the same principles to the Python programming language.
• Delivering a keynote at the Mobile Tartu conference, and participating in the summer school that preceded it, which incidentally led to a new R package [spanishoddata (see below).
• The internationalisation and extension of methods developed for the Propensity to Cycle Tool project, including:
  • Publishing our work on the Cycle Route Uptake and Scenario Estimation (CRUSE) project in an academic paper (see cruse.bike for an interactive web app resulting from the research)
  • Completion of the Biclar web application and paper, published in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (CEUS) describing the underlying methods.
• Participating in the Spatial Data Science across Languages (SDSL) conference, which was held in-person in Prague in September 2024.

My year in open source

In 2024 I continued to contribute to open source projects, including:

• Developing a simple R interface to the od2net Rust crate, which can generate route networks for OD data in a fraction of the time of other approaches.
  • This work was part of the SchoolRoutes project, see the acteng/netgen package for more details.
• Instigating and co-authoring the new spanishoddata R package, which enables reproducible scientific research and discovery in mobility and other fields based on the world’s first open access and high-resolution national origin-destination dataset. Thanks to the Spanish government for making this data open access and to Egor Kotov, who led the development of the package after we met at the Mobile Tartu conference.
• Contributing to the parenx Python package, now on pip which provides functions for simplification of geographic representations of transport networks.
• Work on software for joining spatial networks, including improvements to the stplanr::rnet_join() function and contributions to the anime (Approximate Network Integration, Matching and Enrichment) package for fast and flexible linestring matching in R, Rust and (hopefully soon) other languages.

See my GitHub profile for more details on my open source work.

Community projects

Working across three roles as Lead Data Scientist at Active Travel England, an academic at the University of Leeds, and an author and maintainer of open-source software involved a lot of screen time. The perfect antidote to that is getting outside and doing things with other people and 2024 was pretty strong in that regard. I had three main outlets for my outdoorsy and social side in 2024: the community-run Bike Fix Sunday project to help people fix their bikes in the local community, the Chapeltown Cohousing community-led housing project where I live, and the ‘Oaty Cortado run club’.

These were a fun and rewarding outlet during downtime from work and family life and, as the photos below convey, were great fun.

Bike Fix Sunday

The Bike Fix Sunday Facebook group, we’ve got 150 members now and have fixed a similar number of bikes.

See the Bike Fix Sunday website for more details on the project, which is a great way to meet people in the local community and help people fix their bikes.

Chapeltown Cohousing

Chapeltown Cohousing is a cohousing project in Leeds. It’s a great place to live, with a decent amount of outdoor space that is ideal for children to run around in without the danger of the roads.

Chapeltown Cohousing in the sun, plus Katy and Rosa being surrounded by a rainbow

Other than simply living there and chatting to our amazing neighbours, I’ve got involved in a few initiatives there, including getting a shared electric cargo bike, thanks to a grant from the Leeds Community Climate Grant initiative.

Chapeltown cohousing’s shared electric bike, plus happy travellers on their way home on the nursery run.

The electric cargo bike in action, showing how a good bike trailer + bike can conveniently carry more than many cars.

Oaty Cortado run club

This isn’t an official run club, just a group of mates who go for a coffee once a week or so, and fit in some runs too! I’m not on Strava much, but having seen the impressive activity on there from Oaty Cortado run club member Bobak Champion, getting more involved in running and encouraging more people to do so seems a worthy New Year’s resolution!

Oaty Cortado run club in action.

I’d also like to go on more runs with the little ones: baby Rosa is yet to do a run in the buggy but that should change in 2025!

Family run with the little ones in the bike trailer / running buggy.

Thoughts on 2025

I’m looking forward 2025, building on the foundations laid in 2024. Happy New Year everyone!