Abstract

Transport modelling software is a vital component of modern transport planning.

• They generate the evidence base on which strategic investments are made and, furthermore,
• provide a powerful mechanism for researching alternative futures.

Abstract

Transport modelling software is a vital component of modern transport planning.

• They generate the evidence base on which strategic investments are made and, furthermore,
• provide a powerful mechanism for researching alternative futures.

It would not be an overstatement to say that software determines the range of futures that are visible to policymakers. The focus of this talk is on the status of transport modelling software and how it may evolve in the future. What will they look like? What will their capabilities be? And who will control? Answers to each of these questions will affect the future of transport systems. With reference to my own experience developing R packages for transport planning (notably stplanr, cyclestreets and stats19) and using other tools,

Abstract

Transport modelling software is a vital component of modern transport planning.

• They generate the evidence base on which strategic investments are made and, furthermore,
• provide a powerful mechanism for researching alternative futures.

It would not be an overstatement to say that software determines the range of futures that are visible to policymakers. The focus of this talk is on the status of transport modelling software and how it may evolve in the future. What will they look like? What will their capabilities be? And who will control? Answers to each of these questions will affect the future of transport systems. With reference to my own experience developing R packages for transport planning (notably stplanr, cyclestreets and stats19) and using other tools,

• this talk will make the case that transport modelling software used in practice will become is becoming increasingly data-driven, modular and open.

Impacting the durrent software landscape

• Dominated by a few proprietary products

• Limited support community online

• High degree of lock-in

• Limited cross-department collaboration

Existing products

User support

Getting help is vital for leaning/improving software

User support

Getting help is vital for leaning/improving software

User support

Getting help is vital for leaning/improving software

"10-Hour Service Pack $2,000" (source: caliper.com/tcprice.htm)

Online communities

• gis.stackexchange.com has 21,314 questions

• r-sig-geo has 1000s of posts

• RStudio's Discourse community has 65,000+ posts already!

Online communities

• gis.stackexchange.com has 21,314 questions

• r-sig-geo has 1000s of posts

• RStudio's Discourse community has 65,000+ posts already!

• No transport equivalent (e.g. earthscience.stackexchange.com is in beta)

• Potential for a Discourse forum or similar: transport is not (just) GIS

Best way to get support is peer-to-peer:

Source: https://community.rstudio.com/about

A few prices

Source: google.com/search?q=transcad+price

Is already here I

• Example: the Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT.bike) (Lovelace et al. 2017)

Is already here II

• Example: the Cycling Infrastructure Prioritisation Toolkit (CyIPT.bike)

Is already here III

• Example: StreetMix (streetmix.net)

Sumo vs netlogo

Source: github.com/eclipse/sumo

Source: github.com/nldoc/nlrx

Gamification

• Completely open source, written in rust
• Source: video at https://aeplay.org/citybound

Context: trip to Tecklenburg

That we recorded on phone GPS

And uploaded to OpenStreetMap

• https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/RobinLovelace/traces/2882954

That we recorded on phone GPS

And uploaded to OpenStreetMap

• https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/RobinLovelace/traces/2882954

Loading the tracks

library(sf)

## Linking to GEOS 3.7.0, GDAL 2.3.2, PROJ 5.2.0

u = "https://www.openstreetmap.org/trace/2882954/data"
download.file(u, "trace.gpx")

st_layers("trace.gpx")

## Driver: GPX 
## Available layers:
##     layer_name     geometry_type features fields
## 1    waypoints             Point        0     23
## 2       routes       Line String        0     12
## 3       tracks Multi Line String        1     13
## 4 route_points             Point        0     25
## 5 track_points             Point     2447     26

track = read_sf("trace.gpx", "tracks")
track_points = read_sf("trace.gpx", "track_points")

Static plotting

plot(track[1])
plot(track_points)

'Data science' approach to transport modelling

• Problem: gpx files do not always contain speed

points2line_trajectory = function(p) {
  c = st_coordinates(p)
  i = seq(nrow(p) - 2)
  l = purrr::map(i, ~ sf::st_linestring(c[.x:(.x + 1), ]))
  s = purrr::map_dbl(i, function(x) {
    geosphere::distHaversine(c[x, ], c[(x + 1), ]) /
      as.numeric(p$time[x + 1] - p$time[x])
  }
  )
  lfc = sf::st_sfc(l)
  a = seq(length(lfc)) + 1 # sequence to subset
  p_data = cbind(sf::st_set_geometry(p[a, ], NULL), s)
  sf::st_sf(p_data, geometry = lfc)
}

Source: geocompr.github.io

Creating lines with attributes

l = points2line_trajectory(p = track_points)
plot(l["s"])

All slow sections

l_slow = l[l$s < 20, ]
plot(l_slow["s"])

Interactive plot!

library(tmap)
ttm()
tm_shape(l_slow) +
  tm_lines(col = "s", palette = "magma", n = 9)

Thanks for listening!

Thanks for listening!

A few links and references

• Boyce, D.E., Williams, H.C.W.L., 2015. Forecasting Urban Travel: Past, Present and Future. Edward Elgar Publishing.

• The Propensity to Cycle Tool: http://www.pct.bike/ - Lovelace, R., Goodman, A., Aldred, R., Berkoff, N., Abbas, A., Woodcock, J., 2017. The Propensity to Cycle Tool: An open source online system for sustainable transport planning. Journal of Transport and Land Use 10. https://doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.2016.862

• Open source 'geocompr' book: Lovelace, R., Nowosad, J., Meunchow, J., 2019. Geocomputation with R. CRC Press.

• The Cycling Infrastructure Prioritisation Toolkit: https://www.cyipt.bike/

• Pebesma, E., 2018. Simple Features for R: Standardized Support for Spatial Vector Data. The R Journal.