Abstract
Geographic analysis has long supported transport plans that are appropriate to local contexts. Many incumbent ‘tools of the trade’ are proprietary and were developed to support growth in motor traffic, limiting their utility for transport planners who have been tasked with twenty-first century objectives such as enabling citizen participation, reducing pollution, and increasing levels of physical activity by getting more people walking and cycling. Geographic techniques—such as route analysis, network editing, localised impact assessment and interactive map visualisation—have great potential to support modern transport planning priorities. The aim of this paper is to explore emerging open source tools for geographic analysis in transport planning, with reference to the literature and a review of open source tools that are already being used. A key finding is that a growing number of options exist, challenging the current landscape of proprietary tools. These can be classified as command-line interface, graphical user interface or web-based user interface tools and by the framework in which they were implemented, with numerous tools released as R, Python and JavaScript packages, and QGIS plugins. The review found a diverse and rapidly evolving ‘ecosystem’ tools, with 25 tools that were designed for geographic analysis to support transport planning outlined in terms of their popularity and functionality based on online documentation. They ranged in size from single-purpose tools such as the QGIS plugin AwaP to sophisticated stand-alone multi-modal traffic simulation software such as MATSim, SUMO and Veins. Building on their ability to re-use the most effective components from other open source projects, developers of open source transport planning tools can avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ and focus on innovation, the ‘gamified’ A/B Street https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/#abstreet simulation software, based on OpenStreetMap, a case in point. The paper, the source code of which can be found at https://github.com/robinlovelace/open-gat, concludes that, although many of the tools reviewed are still evolving and further research is needed to understand their relative strengths and barriers to uptake, open source tools for geographic analysis in transport planning already hold great potential to help generate the strategic visions of change and evidence that is needed by transport planners in the twenty-first century.
Highlights
In the context of urgent policy drivers—including the obesity crisis, air pollution concerns and the climate emergency that has been declared by some city authorities—many transport planners have been tasked with new sustainable transport targets, including reduced private car use and increasing levels of walking and cycling (Hickman et al 2011)
In the context of calls for evidence-based policy, open data and citizen science (Banister 2008; Peters 2020)—and political commitments to and actions implementing such principles by actors at state and regional levels (Monbiot 2017; Peters 2020)— there is a growing onus on practitioners to provide solutions that are transparent, accessible and, participatory. This poses a challenge to the vendors of proprietary transport planning software, which tends to be expensive and thereby inaccessible to most people, monolithic and limited in terms of geographic capabilities, in relation to publicly accessible interactive visualisation and adaptability
Game-like approaches to city/street analysis tools such as A/B Street, CityBound and the intuitive and popular Streetmix web service demonstrate the huge potential for tools to revolutionise how transport plans are developed but who can be involved in the planning process
Summary
R. Lovelace already hold great potential to help generate the strategic visions of change and evidence that is needed by transport planners in the twenty-first century. The rewards can be great: transport planners who have designed—and helped to implement—plans appropriate to the needs of an area leave a legacy that will benefit people and the environment for generations to come.. Ways and other pieces of transport infrastructure must go somewhere; transport planning involves consideration of where investment and other interventions are most needed. Despite the inherently geographic nature of movement, and the growth of GIS in transport planning, the importance of geographic in transport systems has long been overlooked (Rodrigue et al 2013), notwithstanding efforts to formalise the field of ‘GIS-T,’ described . Geographic methods—such as origin-destination modelling, route assessment and spatial network analysis—are prominent in the literature, providing evidence for a range of transport planning interventions The fact that geographic methods must be accompanied by software and a user interface if they are to be of use in practice
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