New tools for internationally-scalable future-proof transport planning
October 22, 2025
Context
- About me and my background
- Professor of Transport Data Science at University of Leeds
- Focus on open, reproducible transport planning tools
- Worked in Active Travel England to build data and digital capacity
- What I’ll be talking about today: open, reproducible, internationally-scalable transport tools
- How this aligns with GREENTRAVEL project’s aims and themes
International context
Why open access beyond open source?
“Open access goes beyond open source … users are encouraged to view and edit the source code, with measures taken to make it more user-friendly.”
Source: (Lovelace, Parkin, and Cohen 2020)
Communities of practice
- Open source books have 80+ contributors
- Technical solutions are only as good as the community using (and contributing to) them
- Share datasets, reproducible examples
- Pilot features, report bugs, contribute docs
Example: plan.activetravelengland.gov.uk
Reproducible research in practice
- Fully reproducible pipelines improve trust, reuse and scale
- Example: spanishoddata package and paper now part of rOpenSpain community (Kotov, Lovelace and others, 2025)
Network Planning Tool for Scotland (npts.scot)
- Discover and prioritise active travel networks at scale
- Open data, transparent methods, web UI for planners and the public
- National estimates of road traffic volumes and cycling Level of Service
International portability by design
- Shared, open building blocks (data, code, methods)
- Modular tools adapted from UK to other cities/regions
- Aligns with GREENTRAVEL’s multi-city analyses and exposure-aware routing
Ideas for collaboration
Source: “Dependency” by Randall Munroe: xkcd.com/2347/
Comparing and sharing methods and tools
Illustration of the ‘jittering’ method for adding value to origin-destination datasets by simulating origins and destinations (Lovelace, Félix, and Carlino 2022)
- There is a need for for fundamental and software engineering for efficient solutions
TRACE: scalable, low-cost active travel counts
SchoolRoutes: safer, greener routes to school
NetGen: crowd-informed network generation; “the crowd is the territory” (Anderson et al. 2018)
Thank you
- Slides and code: github.com/robinlovelace/presentations
- Contact: r.lovelace@leeds.ac.uk | (robinlovelace.bsky.social?)
References
Anderson, Jennings, Robert Soden, Brian Keegan, Leysia Palen, and Kenneth M. Anderson. 2018. “The Crowd Is the Territory: Assessing Quality in Peer-Produced Spatial Data During Disasters.” International Journal of HumanComputer Interaction 34 (4): 295–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2018.1427828.
Lovelace, Robin, Rosa Félix, and Dustin Carlino. 2022. “Jittering: A Computationally Efficient Method for Generating Realistic Route Networks from Origin-Destination Data.” Findings, April, 33873. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.33873.
Lovelace, Robin, John Parkin, and Tom Cohen. 2020. “Open Access Transport Models: A Leverage Point in Sustainable Transport Planning.” Transport Policy 97 (October): 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2020.06.015.
New tools for internationally-scalable future-proof transport planning Robin Lovelace r.lovelace@leeds.ac.uk Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds October 22, 2025