Data Science for Transport Planning: 2 day course

Note: tickets are now on sale! Get yours at store.leeds.ac.uk

1 Course Overview

Based on demand, we’re organising a 2-day course teaching modern data science skills for transport planning, focussed on transport planning practitioners. This course first took place 18th and 19th of September 2025.

Course materials can be found at the DSTP course homepage.

2 Learning Objectives

  • Understand the role of data science in transport planning.
  • Learn how to find, import, clean, and analyze transport data.
  • Develop skills in data visualization and reporting.

3 Prerequisites

  • Experience with transport planning concepts and datasets, such as origin-destination data and route networks.
  • Basic programming skills in R, Python or similar.
  • A laptop with R and RStudio (recommended) or a Python distribution such as Anaconda and an editor such as VS Code or Jupyter Notebook set-up.

4 Schedule

4.1 Day 1: Introduction to R/RStudio

  • 10:00 - 11:00 Introduction to Data Science for Transport Planning
  • 11:00 - 12:30 Finding, importing and cleaning transport datasets
    • Origin-destination datasets
    • OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Ordnance Survey (OS) OpenRoads datasets
    • Stats19 road safety data
  • 12:30 - 13:30: lunch
  • 13:30 - 15:00 Origin-destination data analysis
  • 15:00 - 15:15 break and refreshments
  • 15:15 - 17:00 Routing and route network analysis
    • This will cover setting up an interface to a routing engine and using it to calculate routes and distances using GTFS data.

4.2 Day 2:

Course times each day:

  • 09:00 - 10:45 spatio-temporal data
    • Demonstration of open-access OD data with hourly resolution
    • Demonstration with stats19 data for road safety analysis
  • 10:45 - 11:15 break and refreshments
  • 11:15 - 12:30 OD Transport data visualisation
  • 12:30 - 13:30 lunch
  • 13:30 - 15:00 Best practices for data science in transport planning
    • Version control with Git and GitHub
    • Reproducible research with Quarto
  • 15:00 - 16:00 Advanced topics
    • Visualising large datasets
    • Route network integration
      • We’ll present ways to join different networks, e.g. OSM networks
    • Deploying your work as web applications

5 Registration

See store.leeds.ac.uk for registration details.

6 Contact

For inquiries, please contact Robin Lovelace.

We look forward to seeing you at the course!