Transport Tools

This week I was working at a parish 'visioning' day where a community is consulted by their councillors to hear the issues that concerns them and get opinions and ideas on the problems it faces. In such discussions with councillors and residents, many have questions about transport and traffic that can't be answered easily. 

For instance, in some recent work on hospital transport issues, I wanted to find the public transport journey times from each of the major hospitals in Suffolk to show which areas cannot practicably access a hospital by public transport. It would show where it might be sensible to prioritise community transport development. When I asked colleagues if such a tool existed, no one knew of any so when I did find something I think could do it, I thought should bring it everyone's attention.

mapumental.com

This mapping tool is by the very clever people at MySociety and it can interrogate the national train and bus timetables database NaPTAN and map a journey time to/from a given postcode to produce a contour map of journey times. So, for example, places near train stations show up as islands with shorter journey times than other places nearby.

You send them the postcodes you want mapped and they send it back. Each map costs £25. MySociety told me they can do other customised maps but this would cost considerably more.

I think this tool might be also be useful for seeing the footprint of accessibility to a town on market day and so useful for local transport development or town marketing.

There is another version of this kind of mapping made by Traveltime and you can sign up for a 14 day free trial to play with it. It has a different pricing model where you subscribe for unlimited maps for about £90 per month (which isn't quite practicable for me).

For example this map shows where you can drive in 30 minutes from the postcode NR33 8JA, near enough the centre* of Carlton Colville. *Where is the 'centre' of the community was a topic of some lengthy discussion.

If you need to find a postcode to start from, Doogal has a lot of handy tools to tell you what the postcode of a place is.

Mapumental has other mapping tools in beta trial. This one shows the places you can reach from NR33 8JA by 9 am with a journey time of 1.5 hours where the median house price is under £300,000. If the data can be trusted, this would be a house-hunters' dream.

Here I have pasted two maps together to see which areas of Suffolk are within 1.5 hours journey time on public transport to James Paget or Ipswich hospital. This evidence would seem to reinforce the complaint that Halesworth, Peasenhall, Saxmundham and Leiston are not well served. According to the Department for Transport; 21.1 % of people in rural Suffolk live more than 60 mins by public transport from hospital compared to 9.9% of rural England overall. Source: OCSI 2011 Department for Transport (DfT) 2009

There are 35 LSOAs (each averages a population of 5000 people) in Suffolk more than two hours travel time from a hospital by public transport.

This kind of problem was studied in a paper: Taking the bus: incorporating public transport timetable data into health care accessibility modelling by David Martin, Hannah Jordan, Paul Roderick. I don't have access to but you can read the abstract. The paper's findings "highlights the difficulty of combining conventional drive-time analysis with the discontinuous accessibility provided by public transport. There is a need for more attention to be paid to the incorporation of public transport in accessibility modelling."

Many communities want to know what are their commuter traffic patterns and the demand to reach certain destinations. The Office of National Statistics has a free CD called CommuterView which is an interactive tool which shows flows of commuters based on 2001 Census data. Once the CD is loaded, by selecting an area (local authority) of interest within the UK, the major flows of commutes within the area can be seen by moving the mouse. Patterns of flows and major areas of employment are clearly revealed.

You have to email better.info@ons.gov.uk to request a copy which I am told will be eventually be updated with the 2011 data. Suffolk ACRE have a copy if you need charts like these.

Last but not least, my good friends (professionally speaking) at Ito World who produce transport information maps have some great tools based on the Open Street Map where it is merged with other databases. You can see different layers to view:

• road speed limits in miles per hour.
• addressed residences and businesses.
• power generation routes with voltages.
• school distribution in an area.
• water types including rivers, reservoirs, canals and lakes.
• proposed and ongoing construction schemes.
• Disused and abandoned rail tracks.

The good thing about OSM is if you don't find the data you want, you can add it to the map yourself. I feel that data collection and auditing should be part of every parish plan.