The Data Science Campus (DSC) has developed an open source toolkit for measuring the performance of transport in urban areas.
DSC, which works within the Office for National Statistics, said the toolkit can be used throughout the UK and internationally, providing a common methodology to generate comparable insights.
As a proof of concept it has so far been used to produce results for 30 urban centres in Great Britian and to show how it can be used overseas with 17 uses in France.
This follows publication by the organisation on UK-wide hyperlocal public transit accessibility and small area bus service reliability metrics.
DSC said there is often a lack of comparable data with which to assess the performance of different transport networks within the country.
“To start resolving these issues, we aimed to produce robust, open source tooling to assist the public, other government organisations, and national statistical institutes (NSIs) to undertake their own transport performance analysis using a comparable methodology, data, and performance metric,” it said.
“We built this toolkit by bringing together a range of open source packages, tools, and research.”
It consists of a Python package and Docker image hosted GitHub, both providing users with examples of how to reproduce the analysis.
The background to the development of the toolkit and details of some of its early use cases are included in a blogpost by DSC.
“We hope that the public, other public sector organisations, and NSIs can collaborate and build on this toolkit, to help improve the international comparability of statistics and enable higher frequency and more timely comparisons,” DSC said.
It is now inviting feedback and consulting with public sector organisations on the toolkit.
