Public transport accessibility in Great Britain: An open dataset

Understanding how access to amenities by public transport varies across space is important in a wide variety of urban research, e.g., unemployment risks, property and land valuation, or gentrification issues. A considerable amount of empirical research has employed distance-based measures because they are relatively straightforward to derive (e.g. Euclidean distance). In doing so, they overlook the spatial dispersion of urban amenities. Also, they assume access to a car since mobility is seen as being equally possible in all directions. This is not a justifiable assumption in many cases, particularly for lower-income groups in urban areas. It would therefore be useful to incorporate accessibility measures which assume travel by public transport and acknowledge land use.

Location-based accessibility measures can capture both the level of mobility enabled by transport infrastructure and the location of urban services. However, the estimation of these measures for large regions at small areal units is computationally expensive and demands some technical skills. This may represent a limitation for many researchers. The present work addresses this unmet need. It offers a series of accessibility indicators at the level of the Lower Super Output Area/Datazone (LSOA/DZ) covering the whole of Great Britain (GB) in the United Kingdom (UK). Indicators by public transport are offered as open-access and include a range of key amenities and services such as: employment; general practice (GP) surgery; hospital; grocery store; supermarket; primary school; secondary school; and urban centre. Additionally, we include the estimated travel time matrix from each origin to every possible destination, a key input which allows flexibility for users to customize the indexes. In this talk, we will outline how the measures were calculated by giving an overview of the measures themselves.

Resources:

Public transport accessibility in Great Britain: An open dataset

Technical Report: Accessibility Indicators for Great Britain

Public transport accessibility indicators in Great Britain: Repository of materials/code on GitHub