11 Data sources for transport data

There are many good transport datasets out there, but they are not always easy to find.

11.1 Useful data sources

The list below provides links to some key data sources that may be of use and interest, starting with the most universal and easy to use, and ending in rather specific datasets.

• UK geoportal, providing geographic data at many levels: https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk
• Other national geoportals exist, such as this: http://www.geoportal.org/
• A good source of cleaned origin destination data is the Region downloads tab in the Propensity to Cycle Tool (Lovelace et al. 2017) - see the Region data tab for West Yorkshire here, for example: http://www.pct.bike/m/?r=west-yorkshire
• OpenStreetMap is an excellent source of geographic data with global coverage. You can download data on specific queries (e.g. highway=cycleway) from the overpass-turbo service: https://overpass-turbo.eu/

11.1.1 UK specific resources

Students can register with Edina Digimap. It is a service which will allow you to download UK topographic map data.
https://digimap.edina.ac.uk/webhelp/digimapsupport/about.htm#access/access_to_digimap.htm

UK census data can be accessed from several places including: https://census.edina.ac.uk/bds.html https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011

11.1.2 International resources

http://freegisdata.rtwilson.com/ Note this has a listing of several transport data sources http://www.gadm.org/ boundary datasets for administrative areas around the world.
https://www.gislounge.com/world-gis-data/ links to further resources http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Downloading_data information about downloading Open streetmap (OSM) data.
https://library.stanford.edu/research/stanford-geospatial-center/data Stanford University directory of data sources http://www.diva-gis.org/gdata available datasets by country.

(availability of these resources may change)

11.2 Online lists

For other datasets, search online! Good starting points in your research may be:

• The open data section in Lovelace, Nowosad, and Muenchow (2019) - https://geocompr.robinlovelace.net/read-write.html#retrieving-data
• Transport datasets mentioned here: https://data.world/datasets/transportation
• UK government transport data: https://ckan.publishing.service.gov.uk/publisher/department-for-transport

11.3 Data packages

• The ors and OSMTools QGIS plugins provide a range of datasets
• The stats19 package can get road crash data for anywhere in Great Britain (Lovelace et al. 2019) see here for info: https://itsleeds.github.io/stats19/
• The pct package provides access to data in the PCT: https://github.com/ITSLeeds/pct
• There are many other QGIS and R packages and plugins to help access data