Estimating public transport congestion in UK urban areas with open transport models

TL;DR

This paper presents a bottom-up approach using open-source scientific workflows to build transport models for estimating public transport congestion across UK urban areas, enabling health indicator assessments and policy testing.

Contribution

It introduces an open, reproducible framework for urban transport modeling that integrates heterogeneous data and sub-models for congestion estimation.

Findings

Open models facilitate congestion analysis across UK cities.

Framework supports COVID-19 impact assessment on public transport.

Enables testing of transport policies using open data and tools.

Abstract

Operational urban transport models require to gather heterogeneous sets of data and often integrate different sub-models. Their systematic validation and reproducible application therefore remains problematic. We propose in this contribution to build transport models from the bottom-up using scientific workflow systems with open-source components and data. These open models are aimed in particular at estimating congestion of public transport in all UK urban areas. This allows us building health indicators related to public transport density in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, and testing related policies.