Transforming Strategic Active Travel Network Planning Internationally

Impact Case Study Report for REF 2029

Published

July 24, 2025

1 Summary of the impact

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2 Underpinning research

The Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT) for England and Wales has continued to be the main tool for cycle network planning in England and Wales, but has limitations that we have addressed in subsequent work. To tackle the issue that networks generated by the PCT were too sparse, due to use of population weighted centroids as the origin and destination points for trips, we developed a new method called ‘jittering’ (Lovelace, Félix, and Carlino 2022). The PCT only considered trips for commuting and travel to school but transport planners require estimates of potential changes based on all trip purposes, leading to the development of new methods for simulating social, leisure and shopping trips and incorporating them into estimates of cycling potential in the CRUSE tool, which is now in use across the Republic of Ireland (Lovelace et al. 2024). To address the limitation that the methods omitted cycling as part of multi-modal journeys involving public transport, we worked with colleagues at the University of Lisbon to calculate cycling potential to public transport links (Félix, Moura, and Lovelace 2025).

3 References to the research

Félix, Rosa, Filipe Moura, and Robin Lovelace. 2025. “Reproducible Methods for Modeling Combined Public Transport and Cycling Trips and Associated Benefits: Evidence from the biclaR Tool.” Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 117 (April): 102230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2024.102230.
Lovelace, Robin, Rosa Félix, and Dustin Carlino. 2022. “Jittering: A Computationally Efficient Method for Generating Realistic Route Networks from Origin-Destination Data.” Findings, April, 33873. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.33873.
Lovelace, Robin, Joey Talbot, Eugeni Vidal-Tortosa, Hussein Mahfouz, Elaine Brick, Peter Wright, Gary O’Toole, Dan Brennan, and Suzanne Meade. 2024. “Cycle Route Uptake and Scenario Estimation (CRUSE): An Approach for Developing Strategic Cycle Network Planning Tools.” European Transport Research Review 16 (1): 55. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12544-024-00668-8.

4 Details of the impact

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5 Sources to corroborate the impact

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