Long-time series, small-area statistics for car ownership and level of public transport service

Transport policy often suffers from a paucity of spatiotemporal data on which to build a robust evidence base. Long time-series, small-area transport statistics over a large geographical area can provide insights into the effects of a broad range of transport policies. Unfortunately, important gaps in the UK’s small-area statistics limit their usability and effectiveness for answering key policy questions. This paper reviews the state of data in the UK and reports early progress in filling data gaps.

There are several Administrative Datasets (data sets routinely collected by governments) that, when used in a suitable data processing environment, can be ethically repurposed to generate further insights for the public good. Research is currently being funded to make better use of this data through the Administrative Data Research UK programme. Through a current research project in this programme, “CARS” - Connecting Administrative vehicle data for Research on Sustainable Transport, we outline methods and datasets to provide longitudinal small area statistics across the United Kingdom for the period from 2007 to the present for both car ownership and use (by fusing 598 million MOT inspection results from 67 million vehicles provided by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) with vehicle ownership records from the Driver and Vehicle Licence Agency (DVLA) and public transport service data (by processing 12.5 million routes recorded in the public transport timetables). The outputs will include small area statistics which can be made publicly available. The ability to see the change in car use and public transport provision over time would enable policy evaluation and decision support for future transport planning. We also identify other periodically updated datasets that could be linked and provide further insight.