Data Science for Transport Planning: 2 day course

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 will take place on the 18th and 19th of September 2025.

2 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.

3 Schedule

3.1 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 OpenTripple API and using it to calculate routes and distances using GTFS data.

3.2 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

4 Registration

TBC.

We look forward to seeing you at the course!