An open transport planning tool

This is an entry to Nesta and the ODI's Open Data Challenge on jobs. See the CollabFinder description.

This may seem somewhat similar to Accession — an existing proprietary transport planning tool. A new and open approach will offer huge advantages. A lot has changed in a decade!

Poor public transport has played a huge role in the UK's failure to take advantage of agglomeration effects that benefit larger cities. For example, in the 30 years since deregulation, bus use per head in Leeds has fallen from a rate equal to that in London to a rate of just 1/4. In the same time the productivity gap between the cities has increased by nearly 50%. This pattern is repeated in all the UK's mid-size cities where huge numbers of workers would like to access better-paid jobs but are unable to do so.

Cities like Leeds and Birmingham want to fix this problem but they have almost no power to govern public transport. Current devolution deals promise to change this, but after 30 years of declining responsibilities city councils will need to quickly improve their capacity to plan efficient transport systems. Most importantly they will need to liberate existing data on public transport use from current private operators, and start collecting and sharing data from the new systems of publicly-managed public transport. Cities will also face a challenge to re-engage the majority of the UK's urban population that have never experienced publicly-managed public transport.

Public and private opposition to schemes such as Leeds' NGT system show that current closed systems of transport appraisal, using "commercially-sensitive" and therefore closed data, fail to engage the public. An open approach offers huge potential to improve the way our cities function and create more and better jobs.

• The NaPTAN database shows all public transport stops and routes in the UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-public-transport-access-node-schema

• Leeds Data Mill provide a useful subset of NaPTAN for West Yorkshire. http://www.leedsdatamill.org/dataset/bus-stops

• nomis collects and makes available census data for very small areas (LLSOs of just a few streets). These can be linked to geographical files on geoportal for mapping and geographical analysis. Useful datasets include places of work, places of residence, access to a car or van, current family earnings and many more. https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/ https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/geoportal/catalog/main/home.page

• The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have done a huge amount of work into ways to create more jobs, better jobs. Their baseline study is invaluable for understanding the connection between job quality and access to jobs. http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/baseline-jobs-better-jobs

• UK indices of deprivation datasets. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/english-indices-of-deprivation

• An example of the inaccessibility of current transport modelling can be seen here. http://www.ngtmetro.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=4294968248

• We are currently working with West Yorkshire Metro to release data on concessionary bus use in West Yorkshire.

I have already done a significant amount of preliminary work on this project for an innocentive/Economist innovation challenge. The write-up can be found at http://www.tomforth.co.uk/dynamicbusmaps/TForthInnocentiveEconomistWriteUp.pdf

The tool at http://www.tomforth.co.uk/dynamicbusmaps/ may still slightly work.