Visualising People’s Access to Transport in UK Cities

Announcing the first release of our interactive Spatial Urban Data System prototype.

It is difficult to understand urban issues, challenges and opportunities by looking in isolation at cities' individual characteristics. A much richer perspective can be obtained by approaching cities as a whole, considering the interactions and relationships between their many facets. Social, economic, natural, built-environment and other physical infrastructure aspects interplay within cities to inform behaviours and challenge our assumptions about how things should be.

UBDC is developing a geographic database called the Spatial Urban Data System that contains spatially and temporally indexed real and synthetic small scale data capable of telling the complex, multi-dimensional stories of how cities work through scalable, intuitive and interactive interfaces.

In our first prototype release, we present a simple spatial interface that enables users to query UBDC's public transportation availability data, enabling high resolution (census output areas) transport availability analytics across the United Kingdom. The platform provides intuitive means for users to spatially query transport availability factors and indicators that will enable greater understanding of transport availability dynamics at varying spatial scales.

The platform will continue to develop rapidly and additional data, queries, interfaces and modelling tools will be continuously introduced.