Data in active travel is big news right now, and this is our second in a two-part series discussing some of the latest research in the field.

When a global pandemic required us to avoid public transport and, ideally, cars, making cycling's usefulness for everyday trips even more apparent, transport authorities needed to know quickly where a network of cycle routes might be built. In a country with no historical cycle network, let alone a current one, this was a challenge.

Enter Dr Robin Lovelace, with Dr Joey Talbot, at the University of Leeds' Institute for Transport Studies, part of a crack team commissioned to work out where cycle lanes could be installed, both in terms of where there's physical space on the roads, and where protected space would be useful for people looking to get cycling for everyday trips.

So it was, over four weeks, the Rapid Cycleway Prioritisation Tool started life. Robin and colleagues' open data was added as a layer to Widen My Path, which lets people say where they think local cycling and walking infrastructure is needed in their area. Within the first week and a half this function received 30,000 interactions - perhaps indicating the demand from citizens to get involved in improving their local streets.

Robin Lovelace talks about the potential, and the limitations of this new tool, the role it gives citizen activists in shaping cycling and walking policy, and what it was like being part of the project.

You can find it, and have a play with the interactive map, here: https://www.cyipt.bike/rapid/

And on Widen My Path, here: widenmypath.com

Transcript

Laura Laker [00:00:00 ] Hi and welcome to the active travel podcast. A brand new podcast brought to you by the Active Travel Academy. It's part of the University of Westminster in London and works in collaboration with people from inside and outside the university. I'm Lauren Laker, I writes about cycling and walking as a journalist, and I work with the Active Travel Academy. On this podcast, amongst other projects, we have. Robin. Robin. Robin.

Robin Lovelace [00:00:25 ] We have Robin Lovelace with us for the second half of our two part on data in active travel.

Laura Laker [00:00:31 ] Robin is associate professor of Transport Data Science at the University of Leeds Institute of Transport Studies. Robin is a geographer and environmental scientist by training with expertise in geographical information systems, data analysis and modelling. And that and his knowledge and love of active travel helped him to co-produce the Rapid Cycleway Prioritisation Tool with Dr Jerry Talbot. And he's here to talk to us about that today. Welcome, Robin. Great to have you on the podcast.

Robin Lovelace [00:01:05 ] Hi, Laura. Hi, everyone. Listening.

Laura Laker [00:01:08 ] So podcast time. Has your week been?

Robin Lovelace [00:01:11 ] So far, it's been a good week. It's been a great week because I fell way off my shoulders after this very intense contract with the Department for Transport to develop the rapid cycleway prioritisation tool. And certainly, the infrastructure side of it has to be done in a very tight schedule. But the same is on the research side. We were kind of round the clock to go from a prototype to national deployment in four weeks. So, I think a lot of the COVID-19 response stuff, especially in the medical sector, has been very, very impressive. And I'm so glad that we delivered something that hopefully will be useful. This week, I've got my head down in marking. So, it's gone into a more tranquil routine of working from home. But yeah, I think it's been it's been a good week here in North Leeds, where I am based.

Laura Laker [00:02:14 ] Can you just start by telling us a bit about the ITS Institute for Transport Studies?

Robin Lovelace [00:02:20 ] Yeah, sure. Say ITS is a longstanding research department focused on transport. I think it's one of the longest standing, if not the longest standing in the UK and certainly the largest in terms of postgraduate torts. And we have a long history of engagement with policy makers and doing high impact research. So it very much feels like the place to do transport policy research. It's had a huge influence on transport planning, both in terms of the kind of established motorised transport planning, but increasingly this stuff on transport decarbonisation and active modes, which is what I'm interested in. The other thing I should say is that ITS is part of the University of Leeds and it's quite unique in a way, because it's one of the few universities that's got a really big quantitative geography department and it's also got a transport department. And as someone who's at the interface, it's a good place to be. You've got both sides and they can be kind of mutually reinforcing.

Laura Laker [00:03:43 ] And so at the moment, there's obviously an enormous push for a new kind of infrastructure on our roads in terms of cycling, pop-up cycling lanes and pop-up walking infrastructure. And you've been up to your neck in this project for the last four weeks, it sounds like and it's only really just come out. So what we are here to talk about today is the RCPT, which which is using data to identify roads with the highest cycling potential, which is those that can carry the most cycling trips and those with enough widths to accommodate new protective cycleways. And it's really cool, it's got this interactive map, hasn't it? And it's got different layers, it's got the existing cycleways, which are quite often disconnected, disjointed, mixed quality, and then you've got the top ranked cycleways, which is where the greatest demand for cycling is, a cohesive network, which is where you link them all together; roads with spare lanes and then roads with an estimated width of more than 10 metres. How did you go about doing this? Because it's quite it's quite a task, isn't it? When you look at the maps of the UK and then you zoom in and there's all these different coloured lines that you can click on, it's quite a thing you've produced.

Robin Lovelace [00:04:57 ] Say it. We certainly had a very clear brief. I think it's useful to have general purpose tools to inform transport policy because transport shouldn't be seen in isolation. Modes of travel like walking, cycling, cars, buses shouldn't be seen in isolation. So, in the long term, I'm actually in favour of quite general tools. But the Rapid Cycleway Prioritisation Tool was really developed to tackle a very particular question, which was how to invest most cost effectively, the 250 or part of the 250 million pounds that's part of the emergency active travel fund. And that was only announced, I think maybe it was the 9th of May when this was announced by Grant Shapps and it was suddenly clear the councils needed something on which to base their submissions. I think another bit of background is the fact that new statutory guidance has been created by the Department for Transport to support the COVID-19 response, so it's not just the funding it's also the statutory guidance. And this is quite a big departure from the status quo in terms of transport planning. So for the first time ever, to my knowledge, anyway, the Department for Transport has provided advice on what to do in terms of creating extra space walk in cycling, and it specifically said that there should be road space reallocation and that something hasn't been on the table, so to speak. So most of the tools that I've been involved with are assuming that you are going to build new infrastructure either parallel to or in a separate place from the existing roads, whereas this is very much focused on road space reallocation and it's designed to inform rapid decision making. So rather than this tendency of making tools more complicated, we needed to make to simpler so that people could use it to inform their policies as quickly as possible. So that's the kind of policy context, there's also a bit of an advocacy angle because the first early prototype of the work was done in collaboration with Cycling UK, and we did a sketch up. Well, we did some data analysis of major cities in England and we found that most of them have major roads that have this kind of spare space for cycling. So the idea actually came from an advocacy angle. We did a bit of a description of the methods and the Department for Transport picked up on this and eventually commissioned this research to support that emergency active travel fund.

Laura Laker [00:08:17 ] And it's striking, isn't it, when you look at the maps that you've produced, all of these dark blue lines that you see across different cities that represent the top ranked cycle ways that could be built, and they are everywhere. And like you say, it just allows a council to look at a map of the road that they look after and say, "this blue line is where a cycle way needs to be to get the most people travelling for cycling trips". So, the data behind the maps, that was a mixture of things, wasn't it? Was the propensity to cycle tool, which is another thing that you've worked on, which takes data on which journeys people are doing where, and then kind of works out which of those journeys can be cycled.

Robin Lovelace [00:09:05 ] Yes. So the tool is very much building on the strong foundations of previous work. So essentially there's two main input data sets. One of them is on cycling potential at the road network le