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Open source tools for geographic analysis in transport planning
================
2020-11-08

Geographic analysis has long supported transport plans that are
appropriate to local contexts. Many incumbent ‘tools of the trade’ are
proprietary and were developed to support growth in motor traffic,
limiting their utility for transport planners who have been tasked with
21<sup>st</sup> Century objectives such as enabling citizen
participation, reducing pollution, and increasing levels of physical
activity by getting more people walking and cycling. Geographic
techniques — such as route analysis, network editing, localised impact
assessment and interactive map visualisation — have great potential to
support modern transport planning priorities. The aim of this paper is
to explore emerging open source tools for geographic analysis in
transport planning, with reference to the literature and a review of
open source tools that are already being used. A key finding is that a
growing number of options exist, challenging the current landscape of
proprietary tools. These can be classified as command-line interface
(CLI), graphical user interface (GUI) or web-based user interface (GUI)
tools and by the framework in which they were implemented, with numerous
tools released as R, Python and JavaScript packages, and QGIS plugins.
The review found a diverse and rapidly evolving ‘ecosystem’ tools, with
25 tools that were designed for geographic analysis to support transport
planning outlined in terms of their popularity and functionality based
on online documentation. They ranged in size from single-purpose tools
such as the QGIS plugin AwaP to sophisticated stand-alone multi-modal
traffic simulation software such as MATSim, SUMO and Veins. Building on
their ability to re-use the most effective components from other open
source projects, developers of open source transport planning tools can
avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ and focus on innovation, the ‘gamified’
A/B Street simulation software, based on OpenStreetMap, a case in point.
The paper concludes that, although many of the tools reviewed are still
evolving and further research is needed to understand their relative
strengths and barriers to uptake, open source tools for geographic
analysis in transport planning already hold great potential to help
generate the strategic visions of change and evidence that is needed by
transport planners in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century.

# 1 Introduction: geographic analysis in transport planning

Transport planning is an applied discipline involving developing local
policies and the design and placement of physical infrastructure
including ways — highways, railways, cycleways and footways — for the
greatest economic, social and environmental benefit (O’Flaherty and Bell
1997; Parkin 2018). Planning also involves thinking about the future,
envisioning scenarios of change and making the case for change (Timms,
Tight, and Watling 2014). Successful transport plans are therefore a
combination of geographically specific recommendations (e.g. “build this
way here”) and long-term strategies guided by citywide, regional and
national visions (e.g. “imagine the benefits of making the city free
from private cars by 2030”). The rewards can be great: transport
planners who have designed — and helped to implement — plans appropriate
to the needs of an area leave a legacy that will benefit people and the
environment for generations to come.[1]

Transport planning can be considered as “more of an art than a
technique,” although *good* transport plans also rely on robust analysis
and modelling of sometimes large and usually spatial input datasets
(Dios Ort’uzar S. and Willumsen 2011). Ways and other pieces of
transport infrastructure must *go somewhere*; transport planning
involves consideration of where investment and other interventions are
most needed. Tools for geographic analysis have been used in transport
planning since at least the 1990s, when local transport planning bodies
in the United States started using geographic information systems (GIS)
software to support their transport planning activities (Anderson 1991),
taking advantage of newly available software and hardware such as the
Intel 80386 processor (first released in 1985) which could run early
proprietary GISs such as ‘SPANS’ (Ebdon 1992).

Despite the inherently geographic nature of movement, and the growth of
GIS in transport planning, the importance of geographic in transport
systems has long been overlooked (Rodrigue, Comtois, and Slack 2013),
notwithstanding efforts to formalise the field of ‘GIS-T,’ described in
the next section. Geographic methods — such as origin-destination
modelling, route assessment and spatial network analysis — are prominent
in the literature, providing evidence for a range of transport planning
interventions (e.g. Jäppinen, Toivonen, and Salonen 2013; Larsen,
Patterson, and El-Geneidy 2013; Tribby and a. Zandbergen 2012). But
there has been less research into digital geographic *tools*, as
discussed in Section <a href="#the-current-landscape">3</a>, despite the
fact that geographic methods must be accompanied by software and a user
interface if they are to be of use in practice.

A range of data driven transport planning approaches has evolved in
recent years to take advantage of new datasets and technologies. Large
movement datasets from disruptive ‘ride hailing’ firms have been used to
better understand parking patterns (Aryandoust, van Vliet, and Patt
2019); ‘deep learning’ has been used to forecast demand for transport
services in near real-time (Liao et al. 2018). Such novel geographic
approaches can be defined as Geographic Data Science, a still emerging
field that calls for the tighter integration between data science and
geographic research (Singleton and Arribas-Bel 2019). While there is
much academic activity in this direction, the extent to which new
geographic tools have gained traction in practice, and in transport
planning practice in particular, is debatable. In this context, the goal
of this paper is to add to the literature on geographic tools in
transport planning, with a focus on open source options.

At this point some definitions are in order. Although ubiquitous in the
literature, terms such as ‘tool,’ ‘software’ and ‘model’ are often used
interchangeably, relying on the (potentially unsafe) implicit assumption
that everyone shares the same idea of what they mean (see Salter et al.
2009 for an example). For the purposes of this paper, a **tool** is a
broad term referring to a modular piece of software or online service; a
**model**, by contrast, is method or process that is expounded in
theoretical terms; **software** is the collection of computer
instructions that underlies digital tools, encoded in publicly available
and transparent programming languages (in **open source software**) or
in a ‘binary’ file that has “limits against usage, distribution, and
modification that are imposed by its publisher” (Dhir and Dhir 2017),
the inner workings of which are obfuscated from the user (in
**proprietary software**). An increasingly used but seldom defined term
in this context is **ecosystem** which, following Franco-Bedoya et al.
(2017), we define as the wider community of people organizations that
support the development of open source software. The paper focuses on
tools, as opposed to software or software ecosystems, because tools are
tangible and widely understood (unlike software ecosystems) entities
that the end user sees (as opposed to software, which is a rather
esoteric concept).

The focus on *open source* tools for geographic analysis in transport
planning is timely because this is an area of rapid growth, as outlined
in Section <a href="#open-source-tools">4</a>. The topic has yet to be
explored in the academic literature, to the best of the author’s
knowledge. A deeper reason that transport planning benefits from levels
of transparency and citizen participation that are more easily reached
with open source solutions than proprietary solutions (Peters 2020).
Transport planning involves decisions about how public funds, spaces and
other shared resources are used. It is, to a greater or lesser extent,
part of wider democratic processes that reflect contemporary political
and societal priorities (Legacy 2016). These priorities have shifted
substantially over the past few decades, meaning that transport plans
based on out-of-date ideas or faulty model assumptions (such as the
assumption that congestion can be tackled by building more roads) can
lead to unwanted impacts (such as increased congestion), which can be
fatal (Hollander 2016).

The importance of transparency and democratic accountability in
transport planning (and hence the importance of open source tools in
transport planning) has increased alongside wider campaigns for
evidence-based decision making and ‘participatory democracy’ (Monbiot
2017; Hackl et al. 2019), and growing evidence that transport systems
cause substantial damage to the environment and human health and
wellbeing. Roads are now the “leading cause of death for children and
young adults aged 5-29 years” with 1.35 million people killed and tens
of millions injured and disabled each year due a range of factors
including unsafe speeds, weak road traffic laws, lack of enforcement and
poor infrastructure that forces pedestrians and cyclists to mix with
motorised modes (World Health Organization 2018). The air pollution
impacts could be even greater, with a growing body of research linking
air pollution to Alzheimer’s disease, lung cancer and heart disease
among hundreds of millions of sufferers worldwide (Kampa and Castanas
2008; Kilian and Kitazawa 2018). Transport is responsible for a quarter
of global greenhouse gas emissions and growing (Harrison and Hester
2017), and is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise (Moriarty and
Honnery 2008), meaning that reducing transport energy use is an urgent
priority.

Transport planning is inherently embedded within local geographic
contexts because transport systems, and associated networks of physical
infrastructure, are highly localised (Barth’elemy 2011; Levinson 2012)
and to some degree dynamic (Xie and Levinson 2011) phenomena. Transport
planning is therefore fundamentally a *geographic activity*. All
accurate geographic coordinates are defined with reference to the
Earth’s surface, either via geographic or projected coordinate systems
(Sherman 2008). By extension, transport planning is a geographic
enterprise.

The influential textbook *Modelling Transport* outlines the main stages
of transport planning as follows (Dios Ort’uzar S. and Willumsen 2011).

1.  problem formulation
2.  data collection
3.  modelling/analysis
4.  evaluation
5.  implementation of solutions

Each of these stages, illustrated in Figure
<a href="#fig:schematic">1.1</a>, has geographic components. The
3<sup>rd</sup> stage, can refer to at least three distinct processes:
the ‘four stage’ transport model (left box); scenario modelling (central
box) or geographic analysis and modelling (right box, Figure
<a href="#fig:schematic">1.1</a>). The wider point is that geographic
techniques can supplement and in some cases replace traditional
modelling, and the classic four stage transport model. Many of the
inputs (datasets with geographic coordinates) and outputs (maps and
geographically specific recommendations) shown in Figure
<a href="#fig:schematic">1.1</a> are spatial, suggesting the importance
of geographic tools throughout the transport planning process.

<img src="flow-diagram.png" alt="Schematic diagram illustrating the modelling process, geographic analysis and the four-stage in the context of the wider transport planning process (adapted from Ortúzar and Willumsen, 2011, with the 'Geographic analysis and modelling component' added for this paper)." width="100%" />
<p class="caption">
Figure 1.1: Schematic diagram illustrating the modelling process,
geographic analysis and the four-stage in the context of the wider
transport planning process (adapted from Ortúzar and Willumsen, 2011,
with the ‘Geographic analysis and modelling component’ added for this
paper).
</p>

</div>

**Formulation of the problem** (stage 1 in the transport planning
process illustrated in Figure <a href="#fig:schematic">1.1</a>) and
identification of the scope of solutions that the transport planning
process can propose is inherently geographic. The first step of many
projects is defining the ‘region of interest.’ This step has important
implications because it can focus the analysis on areas where solutions
are most likely to be implemented and, conversely, highlight the
potential for inter-regional collaboration. Although the region of
interest may be pre-determined by administrative boundaries over which a
planning authority presides, geographic analysis this first stage in the
transport planning process can help refine the definition of the ‘region
of interest’ to include different ‘spheres of influence’ such as the
wider catchment area, the administrative region, and the area that is
the focus of the study.

**Data collection** (stage 2) is an explicitly geographical activity,
although in some cases the geographic components of valuable data are
not used (origin-destination datasets in which the coordinates of
origins and destinations are excluded represent a common example).
Geographic analysis tools can support this stage not only by providing
descriptive overviews of the datasets available to planners (and their
limitations such as parts of a city lacking in data), but by flagging
places where additional monitoring is needed (e.g Lindsey et al. 2013).

Likewise, **modelling** (stage 3) is a central component of data-driven
transport planning. Whether the modelling involves a four stage model,
statistical modelling or geographic analysis, it inevitably contains
some geographic analysis.

Geographic analysis is implicit in the classic four-stage model: 1) trip
generation (the number of trips generated by each zone in a region) is
influenced by geographic factors such as number of buildings in the
direct surroundings; 2) the distribution of these trips to destinations
depends on explicitly geographic factors such as absolute and relative
distances; 3) mode split is influenced by geographic factors such as the
gradient and motor traffic speeds and volumes associated with routes
between origins and destinations; and 4) assignment to the route network
clearly depends on a realistic representation of footways, cycleways,
highways and other geographic entities such as traffic lights that
affect route choice. Likewise statistical modelling includes
consideration of trip distances and destinations, which imply some level
of geographic analysis. Four-stage and statistical modelling options can
be supplemented by **geographic analysis and modelling**, something that
has been recognised since at least the 1990s (Anderson 1991). Critical
to any modelling exercise are scenarios, which can be either ‘global’
(such as a nationwide increase in fueld tax) or ‘local’ (such as the
creation of new public transport routes on specific roads) in nature.
The latter type of scenario require geographical inputs, such as
simulating a new cycleway or bus stop. These are arguably more tangible
and relevant to the city and regional levels at which many transport
plans are developed than abstract ‘global’ changes (e.g. Larsen,
Patterson, and El-Geneidy 2013).

Geographic considerations are particularly important in stage 4,
**evaluation of solutions and recommendations** to policy makers, but
are often overlooked. If recommendations resulting from an ‘optimal’
model have geographically uneven impacts, it risks exacerbating existing
spatial inequalities. Geographic analysis of the results of the
transport planning process, in addition to geographic analysis of input
data, can support more spatially equitable development which could have
a co-benefit of reducing travel demand: wage and other differences
between cities are a major driver of (often energy intensive) inter-city
travel demand (Schmutz and Sidib’e 2019). And of course the the
implementation of effective solutions relies on results that are
specific, including being geographically specific and presented in clear
and accurate geographic visualisations (Pensa, Masala, and Lami 2013).

The stages represented in Figure <a href="#fig:schematic">1.1</a> have
been criticized for being simplistic, linear and ‘top-down,’ with
particularly strong criticisms focusing on the lack of stages for impact
assessment and public participation (Löfgren, Nilsson, and Johansson
2018; Tornberg and Odhage 2018), and more sophisticated representations
of key stages in the planning system have been expounded for some time
(Batty 1995). However, there is little doubt that the ‘formulate →
collect → model → evaluate → implement’ approach continues to be popular
and that, within this framework, each stage (particularly ‘modelling’
which includes geographic analysis and modelling) could benefit from
increased access to geographic insights.

Due partly to data and computing limitations (outlined in the next
section) geographic considerations are not always considered, with
consequences for the solutions resulting from the transport planning
process and the extent to which they adapt to local geographic factors.
Lack of access to, knowledge of and skills in the use of tools for
geographic analysis represent another reason why geographic factors may
be excluded from transport plans (although evidence of the tools that
transport planners use and can use is scarce, suggesting areas of future
research, as discussed in Section <a href="#conclusion">5</a>). There
*is* evidence that these ‘barriers to entry’ for geographic analysis —
at high resolution based on high quality data and high performance
software — are being removed, as outlined in Section
<a href="#open-source-tools">4</a>. In this context, the aim of this
paper is to explore emerging open source tools for geographic analysis
in transport planning, with reference to the literature.

The increased availability of open access geographic data and high
performance computing technologies (in addition to policy drivers
increasing demand for geographic analysis) over the last few decades is
discussed in the next section. Despite the increasing availability of
open source options, proprietary tools still appear to dominate
transport planning in practice, as we will see in Section
<a href="#the-current-landscape">3</a>. The nature and functionality of
open source tools for geographic analysis in transport planning is
outlined in Section <a href="#open-source-tools">4</a>. Section
<a href="#conclusion">5</a> concludes by summarising the state and
future prospects of open tools in transport planning, highlighting gaps
in the current crop of open source options, and flagging ways of getting
involved to improve the provision of open source tools for the benefit
of researchers, companies, governments and interested citizens with
stakes in transport planning processes.

# 2 Policy and technological drivers

Two major drivers of change in transport planning tools have
historically been technological development and shifting political
priorities (Boyce and Williams 2015). Environmental, health and equality
regulations — which can be seen as a manifestation of political change —
have also influenced transport planning practice and some specific
transport planning tools have emerged to tackle particular issues (e.g.
Vandenbulcke et al. 2009). Environmental concerns, including fears about
the impact of climate change, have risen up policy agendas in recent
years, meaning that such environmental policy drivers a likely to become
more important in the coming years. In parallel, the ‘obesity crisis’
and mounting evidence of the health benefits of physical activity have
provided impetus to plans that prioritise walking and cycling, with
environmental co-benefits. There have also been calls for more
‘bottom-up’ and participatory approaches, although transport planning
practice has been slow to change in this direction (Legacy 2016). No
less important is the demand for localised results; while a national
transport model can provide a high level overview of the transport
system for policy-makers, tools that provide geographically specific
results, potentially down to the street level, can support transport
planners ‘on the ground.’

Environmental and (local participatory) political factors drive demand
for transport planning tools that enable geographic analysis:
sustainable modes such as walking and cycling (and to a lesser extent
public transport) require greater consideration in the spatial variation
in trip origins and destinations at high levels of geographic
resolution: analysis with limited consideration of geographic factors,
such as the spatial distribution of locations within walking distance of
new infrastructure, is less able to inform investment in active travel
or provide citizens with localised information. A final driver of demand
for such tools is technology. Rapidly emerging digital technologies
could transform transport planning, with two-way communications between
planning authorities and citizens, and even peer-to-peer communications
on transport planning issues, now feasible.[2] These drivers of change
provide the context in which open source tools for transport planning
are being developed.

## 2.1 Political drivers

The history of transport modelling shows that transport planning
software was originally designed in the late 1950s and onwards to plan
for “increased use of cars \[for personal travel\], and trucks for
deliveries and goods movement” (Boyce and Williams 2015). Policy drivers
have changed dramatically since then: climate change mitigation, air
quality improvement and public health are prioritised in the emergent
‘sustainable mobility paradigm’ (Hickman, Ashiru, and Banister 2011;
Johansson et al. 2017; Department for Transport 2020). Yet many
traditional transport planning tools focus on motor traffic, emphasising
travel time savings impacts over environmental and health savings (Hall,
Willumsen, and Van Vliet 1980; Dios Ort’uzar S. and Willumsen 2011),
often at low levels of geographic resolution (Hollander 2016). These
observations have led to criticism of transport models which are deemed
unable to represent transport network details such as pavement and way
widths that are needed effectively design for active transport (Parkin
2018) or capture
[community](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/246480147_Inside_the_Blackbox_Making_Transportation_Models_Work_for_Livable_Communities)
input (Beimborn and Kennedy 1996).

Tools for 21<sup>st</sup> Century transport planning need to tackle very
different questions, such as: What are the barriers preventing people
from switching to more sustainable modes of transport, and where are
these barriers located? How are transport behaviours likely to shift in
the future, in response to technological changes including autonomous
vehicles and the continued rise of online working? Where will different
types of intervention be most effective? And how can citizens be engaged
in transport decisions? Tools that can help answer these questions are
becoming an increasingly important part of the transport planner’s
cabinet (te Brömmelstroet and Bertolini 2008).

As the gap between what the science seems to say is necessary in the
near future and the reality of polluting and unhealthy transport systems
grows, so does the need for transparent models that stand up to scrutiny
and enable participation and informed debate. This has been well
documented in with respect to energy models by Morrison (2018), who
observed that “opaque policy models simply engender distrust.” The same
could be said of transport models, driving demand for tools that are
open to public scrutiny and community involvement. In parallel, growing
awareness of the need for sustainable transport planning solutions has
also driven demand for geographically locallised transport planning
tools.

## 2.2 Demand for localised results

With the emphasis shifting to reducing travel by building ‘liveable’
communities and enabling mode shift (Sallis et al. 2016), localised and
geographically specific considerations may become increasingly prominent
in future plans. To illustrate this point, imagine being the mayor of a
major city that has declared a ‘climate emergency’ and who has been
given the task of leading the transition away from fossil fuels
(Hadfield and Cook 2019). Policies such as carbon taxes would
undoubtedly be needed at the national level but your focus would
naturally be on the bounds of the local authority over which you have
some power.

Except for specific national transport policies such as fuel tax,
transport policies tend to have geographic outcomes (to build new cycle
infrastructure, for example, which must go somewhere) and this is
especially so for low-carbon transport plans which tend to operate over
distances of hundreds of metres rather than dozens of kilometres, due to
inherent limits in the speeds of active modes (Iacono, Krizek, and
El-Geneidy 2010).

Even high level national plans for a walking and cycling revolution must
be implemented locally, down to the level of streets, as illustrated by
the still ongoing local implementation of Dutch cycling ambitions
(Pucher and Buehler 2008). The political-democratic and local-geographic
aspects of transport planning can be considered in isolation, but an
integrated approach is necessary for effective policies (Hull 2008).
This is well illustrated by prominent Mayoral transport policies in
cities such as London,[3] Paris[4], and Bogotá,[5] where geographically
specific interventions (such as congestion charges in carefully
demarcated central zones) combined with citywide vision have enabled
modal shift.

With issues such as climate change, air pollution, obesity and social
inequalities high on the political agenda, and the benefits for ‘early
adopters’ of evidence-based interventions to accelerate the shift away
from the motor car in cities such as London, Paris and Bogotá, pressure
is growing on local, city and national transport planning departments to
act. But what should they do, and where should they intervene?
Geographical data and to some extent analysis (e.g. calculating
distances) was integral to this ‘computational transport planning’
activity, but input datasets were limited in size and accuracy. Partly
in response to such drivers for geographic analysis in transport
planning, there have been various attempts to define a more applied GIS
approach transport research. Miller (1999) advocated a new field, GIS
for Transport (GIS-T), posited as an academic field at the interface
between transport planning and GIS. Although the label gained limited
traction in academia or practice, Harvey Miller’s call for a shift to
methods and tools has been answered in the 2000s and 2010s by
researchers who have developed ideas and software that transport
planners can actually use, including the Australian Research
Infrastructure Network (AURIN), which is widely used for transport
planning and public health research in Australia (Pettit et al. 2014)
and the Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT, publicly available, including
source code, at [www.pct.bike](https://www.pct.bike)) (Goodman et al.
2019).

## 2.3 Technological drivers

Technological change has increased the capabilities of transport
planners since the the beginning of the discipline, with transport
planning tasks being an early use case of mainframe computers (Boyce and
Williams 2015). With unprecedented access to increasingly detailed
datasets on transport behaviours and infrastructure, transport planners
today require tools that enable them to make sense of this ‘data
revolution’ (Transport Systems Catapult 2015). The sheer volume and
complexity of new datasets require new approaches that can scale and
integrate multiple data sources (Lovelace et al. 2016). Advances in
software and hardware allow not only for current transport systems to be
modelled at high temporal and geographic resolution, but for future
scenarios and ‘model experiments’ to be developed, which can support
identification and implementation of the most effective interventions
(Klosterman 1999).

With the explosion in open source software, which has risen to
prominence data science, policy, data and technological drivers are
pushing for geographic analysis to be better integrated in transport
planning tools, alongside wider shifts for towards more data driven,
transparent and democratically accountable transport planning workflows.
At present this dream is far from reality, despite the long history of
geographic methods, public involvement and technological innovation in
transport planning.

# 3 The current landscape

In broad terms, digital transport planning tools are like any other
computer program in that they take inputs which are processed to
generate outputs (Knuth 1997). The broader term ‘transport model’ is
sometimes used interchangeably with transport software but in this paper
we follow (Hollander 2016) in using ‘model’ to refer to the theories and
mathematics underlying transport planning software, rather than the
software that implements the model.[6] In relation to the narrower
concept of ‘algorithm,’ transport planning software can be seen as a
computing environment or system that provides a user interface to run a
range of algorithms interactively on a range of input datasets to
generate outputs that can feed into the wider transport planning process
(Boyce and Williams 2015).

Software for transport planning can be grouped by the scale at which it
operates, with broad categories being microscopic and macroscopic
(macro) models (Kotusevski and Hawick 2009; Hildebrand and Hörtin 2014).
Microscopic transport models represent individual vehicles on the road
network and are therefore able to represent localised phenomena such as
traffic congestion. Macro models, by contrast, represent aggregates of
vehicular traffic over large spatial scales, in which “the total flow is
studied” and behaviour of individual vehicles is omitted (Hildebrand and
Hörtin 2014). Of course the distinction is, in reality, an
oversimplification: there is a continuum between macro and microscopic
transport models; advances in computing increasingly enable both
approaches to be combined, enabling researchers to choose the most
appropriate spatial scales for their application (Moeckel et al. 2018).
The focus of this paper is on macro models which enable modelling of the
implications of future changes in transport behaviour and infrastructure
on flow at city scales, with results down the route network level
(microscopic models tend to be used to model individual route segments
and intersections), and their geographic analysis capabilities.

This history is detailed in Chapter 10 of *Forecasting Urban Travel*
(Boyce and Williams 2015) called “Computing environment and travel
forecasting software,” which provides an insight into how software has
been used in transport planning over the years. Of course, software
development has always depended on the physical hardware on which it
runs and the early days of transport planning software were
characterised by bespoke programs running on mainframe computers and
maintained by domain experts. Transport planning bodies and researchers
in the USA led developments in the 1960s and 1970s when computers first
started to be used for transport planning, when the main problem that
they addressed was how to deal with the explosive growth in car
ownership and use that was taking place during those decades. More
overtly political factors also influenced the direction of transport
planning software: “certain private firms complained to US DoT
\[Department of Transport\] that its agencies were developing software
in competition with the private sector,” leading to the abandonment of
publicly funded transport planning software development projects,
notably UTPS (Boyce and Williams 2015).[7] This transfer of transport
planning software development to the private sector contrasts with the
history of GIS. The example of GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis
Support System) illustrates this point and helps explain the dominance
of proprietary software in transport planning. Like UTPS, GRASS was a
publicly funded software project. Unlike UTPS, it was made freely
available to the public and was open sourced (in 1999), meaning that it
has been under continuous development by state, academic and commercial
organisation since 1982 (Neteler and Mitasova 2008). Would the landscape
of transport planning software have been different if the DoT had
continued to fund software development projects? That question is
outside the scope of this paper. What is certain, however, is that
software used in transport planning over the past three decades has been
dominated by companies and that the sector has been slow to adopt open
an open source approach.

In response to the ‘siloed’ development of GIS and transport software,
there have been calls for greater integration. Loidl et al. (2016),
building on the observation that “geography and GIS remained a niche
topic within traditional transport modeling,” made a case for
strengthening the ‘spatial perspective’ in transport modelling. The
paper emphasised the growing importance of well-defined data types,
disaggregating detailed (and difficult to interpret) transport model
outputs, and geographic data visualisation and concluded that much
further research is needed: “future research and development is needed
to combine geospatial functionalities with transport modeling, while
providing an efficient, interactive, visual interface for data
exploration, manipulation, analysis and visualization” (Loidl et al.
2016). Although the paper focussed on conceptual issues rather than
software per-se, it did identify mention four open source programming
languages that could provide the foundation for future developments, two
of which (R and Python) are covered in the next section.

Data preprocessing and analysis stages are generally done in dedicated
transport planning and spreadsheet software. Geographic analysis and
cartographic visualisation stages are often done in a dedicated GIS.
Some prominent transport planning software products, and levels of
support for geographic data analysis, are summarised in Table 1, which
shows that popular transport planning tools have differing levels of
geographic capabilities.

| Software | Company/Developer  | Company HQ | Licence           | Citations |
|:---------|:-------------------|:-----------|:------------------|----------:|
| MATSim   | TU Berlin          | Germany    | Open source (GPL) |       901 |
| Visum    | PTV                | Germany    | Proprietary       |       512 |
| ArcMap   | ESRI               | USA        | Proprietary       |       449 |
| SUMO     | DLR                | Germany    | Open source (EPL) |       330 |
| TransCAD | Caliper            | USA        | Proprietary       |       229 |
| Emme     | INRO               | Canada     | Proprietary       |       201 |
| Cube     | Citilabs           | USA        | Proprietary       |        91 |
| sDNA     | Cardiff University | UK         | Open source (GPL) |        27 |

Table 3.1: Sample of transport modelling software in use by
practitioners, with citation counts based on citation from searches for
the product name (plus company name for the common word ‘cube’) and
‘transport planning.’ Data source: Google Scholar searches, August 2020.

An interesting observation is that the open source options — MATSim,
SUMO and sDNA — all have limited ‘in house’ geographic capabilities.
This can be explained by the ‘Unix philosophy,’ the second tenet of
which is modularity, meaning that “each program should do one thing
well,” reducing duplication of effort and allowing the best tool to be
used for each job (Gancarz 2003). The next section describes the this
modularity in more detail, including outstanding support for geographic
data in open source software.

There are many barriers reducing access to prominent tools in the
current landscape of transport planning. Proprietary tools are expensive
(costing up to hundreds of dollars for a single license), ensuring that
only a small fraction of transport planners, let alone the public, has
access to them. Many proprietary tools are tied to a particular Windows,
preventing use in on other operating systems such as Linux, Mac and
FreeBSD. This reduces reproducibility of results and prevents ‘citizen
science’ and educational projects that use the same tools as
professional planners.

A wider barrier is that organisations’ GIS and Transport functions tend
to be siloed into their respective departments/teams with little
communication between them, meaning that transport planners may not have
access to the latest geographic data or software.[8] This relates to
tools because if transport planners and GIS analysts are using different
programs for their work, transport planners will be less likely to
collaborate with people with geographic analysis skills or identify
potential geographic solutions to their domain-specific problems. The
extent to which these barriers can be overcome by open source software
ecosystems is explored in the next section.

# 4 Open source tools for geographic analysis in transport planning

Technological, environment and societal changes are driving demand for
accessible tools for geographic analysis transport planning. This
section reviews prominent open source tools that are already being used
to tackle transport planning challenges. Open source tools for
geographic analysis in transport planning have not emerged in a vacuum.
They were developed in the wider landscape of open source software (Dhir
and Dhir 2017).

These tools could be classified by the five main stages illustrated in
Figure <a href="#fig:schematic">1.1</a> (data collection, processing,
routing, modelling and visualisation). Instead, because many tools can
be used in multiple stages, can be more usefully classified from the
user’s perspective. Based on open tools identified through web searches,
they can be classified into the follow broad, and to some extent
overlapping,[9] user interface (UI) types (see Table
<a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a>):

-   command-line interface (CLI) tools, primarily controlled by typing
    commands
-   graphical user interface (GUI) tools, primarily controlled by mouse
    clicks
-   web user interface (WUI) tools that users access through a web
    browser
-   web application programming interfaces (API) that computers access
    over the web

In this paper we will focus on projects in the first three categories.
Numerous open source ‘routing engine’ projects provide a range of high
performance routing and other transport data analysis services via a web
application programming interface (API). While technically these can be
used for geographic analysis tasks, they are more commonly used by
transport planners as remote services, and are usually the preserve of
software developers, so were excluded from Table
<a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a>.

## 4.1 Defining open source

Before describing open source tools for transport planning, classified
by their main user interface, is worth considering what ‘open source’
means.

Open source software differs from proprietary software in that users are
free to see, download and modify the source code. Freedom is central to
open source software, which is sometimes referred to simply as ‘free
software,’ defined by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as follows:[10]

> software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and
> modify it.

This adaptability is conducive to collaboration, the creation of
mutually supportive user/developer communities and rapid evolution,
making open source software ecosystems fast moving and highly diverse.
It is impossible to discuss all software options that could be used for
geographic transport planning: there are literally thousands of software
projects written in dozens of programming languages, many of which are
no longer actively maintained (Coelho et al. 2020). Transport planners
should use solutions that are future proof and actively maintained.

## 4.2 Methods to identify open source tools

To identify open source tools for transport planning, a search approach
was used to incorporate projects that have been written-up in the
academic literature, and projects which exist only as software projects,
with a minimum level of popularity. The method was as follows:

1.  Undertake searches of Google Scholar, DuckDuckGo and the popular
    code hosting platform with search terms set to identify open source
    projects for transport planning.
2.  Combine results from the searches into a single dataset and rank the
    projects according to evidence of usage.
3.  Verify that the projects are open source and actively maintained by
    analysis of package documentation and source code.
4.  Classify and the projects based on their main user interface,
    resulting in Table <a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a> (see
    [open\_tools.csv](https://github.com/Robinlovelace/open-gat/blob/master/open_tools.csv)
    for a more complete list that includes web APIs). These tools are
    described in more detail in the following three sections.

The following search terms were used to find relevant projects using
Google Scholar, the result of a search shown in Figure
<a href="#fig:scholar-search">4.1</a>:

> software transport “open source” “transport planning” OR “geographic
> data” OR “geographic analysis” OR “spatial data” OR “spatial network”

<img src="scholar-search.png" alt="Illustration of the Google Scholar search terms used to identify open source software for geographic analysis in transport planning." width="60%" />
<p class="caption">
Figure 4.1: Illustration of the Google Scholar search terms used to
identify open source software for geographic analysis in transport
planning.
</p>

</div>

To identify open source projects on GitHub’s [advanced search
page](https://github.com/search/advanced) a ‘snowball’ method, analogous
to that used by Grabowicz et al. (2012) in the context of social media,
was used. The ‘topic’ descriptions of previously identified open tools
were used to identify additional projects and search terms. This method
worked as follows:

-   The GitHub page of the previously identified project stplanr project
    was visited.
-   One of the ‘topics’ in the stplanr repository was was the broader
    term `transport`, which was used to identify the SUMO project
-   The SUMO project had the topic ‘simulation,’ leading to the
    discovery of the A/B Street project

The list of GitHub topics used to identify projects was as follows
(manual reading of the README for each project was used to confirm if
the projects were related to transport planning, many were not,
e.g. because they were for web transport rather than transport
planning):

> [transport planning](https://github.com/topics/transport-planning),
> [transport](https://github.com/topics/transport),
> [transportation-planning](https://github.com/topics/transportation-planning),
> [traffic-simulation](https://github.com/topics/traffic-simulation),
> [simulation](https://github.com/topics/simulation),
> [trajectory](https://github.com/topics/trajectory)

To overcome the limitation that not all open source software projects
are hosted on GitHub *or* described in academic papers, snowballing via
web pages such as the [QGIS plugin homepage](https://plugins.qgis.org/),
links in project README files and [social
media](https://twitter.com/robinlovelace/status/1290636806078201856)
were used to find additional projects. Only projects with the following
criteria were included (see
[open\_tools.csv](https://github.com/Robinlovelace/open-gat/blob/master/open_tools.csv)
for online version):

1.  The tool was designed to support transport planning using geographic
    data analysis and supports the design and placement of physical
    infrastructure for urban mobility, based on the project’s website or
    code repository
2.  Evidence that the tool is being used in practice, via citations,
    ‘stars’ or other type of ‘upvote’
3.  Evidence that the tool is actively maintained, with activity in the
    last 12 months
4.  Availability of source code with a visible open source license

A secondary filter was used to focus attention on tools for analysis:
projects whose primary purpose is to provide an interface to an existing
software/services, such as the R package **opentripplanner** (e.g.
Morgan et al. 2019; Giraud 2019) and routing engines (Luxen and Vetter
2011; Padgham 2019) are omitted from Table
<a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a> for brevity (routing engines are
mentioned in the final section of the paper). Tools can be classified in
a variety of ways from a developer’s perspective including sometimes
tribal ‘ecosystems’ such as R packages, Python packages and QGIS
plugins.

From a transport planner’s perspective, however, the technology or
developer community from which tools emerge may be irrelevant: what is
important is what the tool can do and its ease-of-use. We therefore
describe the tools in order of their primary user interface, in
chronological order of the interface’s development (CLIs predate GUIs
which predate WUIs), acknowledging the fact that most tools with a
prominent GUI and WUI can also be used from the command line. While sDNA
and AequilibraE *can* be used from the command-line, their documentation
suggests they are more likely to be used from graphical interfaces via
QGIS plugins, resulting in the categorisation shown in Table
<a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a>.

| Tool                                                                  | Type               | Licence    | Language   | Stars | Citations | Reference                |
|:----------------------------------------------------------------------|:-------------------|:-----------|:-----------|------:|----------:|:-------------------------|
| [OSMnx](https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx/)                            | Python package     | MIT        | Python     |  2496 |       302 | (Boeing 2017)            |
| [SUMO](https://github.com/eclipse/sumo)                               | Standalone         | EPL-2.0    | C++        |   736 |       219 | (Lopez et al. 2018)      |
| [UrbanSim](https://github.com/UDST/urbansim)                          | Python package     | AGPLv3     | Python     |   310 |      1444 | (Waddell 2002)           |
| [MovingPandas](https://github.com/anitagraser/movingpandas/)          | Python package     | BSD-3      | Python     |   307 |         6 | (Graser 2019)            |
| [MATSim](https://github.com/matsim-org/matsim-libs)                   | Standalone         | GPLv2      | Java       |   285 |       564 | (Horni et al. 2016)      |
| [Scikit-mobility](https://github.com/scikit-mobility/scikit-mobility) | Python package     | BSD-3      | Python     |   251 |         1 | (Pappalardo et al. 2019) |
| [stplanr](https://github.com/ropensci/stplanr)                        | R package          | MIT        | R          |   201 |         9 | (Lovelace et al. 2018)   |
| [momepy](https://github.com/martinfleis/momepy)                       | Python package     | MIT        | Python     |   133 |         3 | (Fleischmann 2019)       |
| [Trip-simulator](https://github.com/sharedstreets/trip-simulator)     | JavaScript package | MIT        | JavaScript |   117 |        NA | NA                       |
| [urbanaccess](https://github.com/UDST/urbanaccess)                    | Python package     | AGPLv3     | Python     |   105 |        12 | (Blanchard 2017)         |
| [spaghetti](https://github.com/pysal/spaghetti)                       | Python package     | BSD-3      | Python     |    60 |         0 | (Gaboardi et al., 2018)  |
| [urbanpy](https://github.com/EL-BID/urbanpy)                          | Python package     | MIT        | Python     |    16 |        NA | NA                       |
| [A/B Street](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet)                 | Standalone         | Apache-2.0 | Rust       |  4896 |        NA | NA                       |
| [AequilibraE](https://github.com/AequilibraE/AequilibraE-GUI)         | QGIS plugin        | Custom     | Python     |    57 |         3 | (Carmargo 2015)          |
| [QNEAT3](https://github.com/root676/QNEAT3/)                          | QGIS plugin        | GPLv3      | Python     |    35 |        NA | NA                       |
| [Networks plugin](https://github.com/crocovert/networks)              | QGIS plugin        | GPLv3      | Python     |     9 |        NA | NA                       |
| [sDNA](https://github.com/fiftysevendegreesofrad/sdna_open)           | QGIS plugin        | GPLv3      | C++        |     9 |        27 | (Cooper 2015)            |
| [AwaP](https://github.com/Awapic/AwaP)                                | QGIS plugin        | GPLv3      | Python     |     3 |         2 | (Majik and Pafka 2019)   |
| [Citybound](https://github.com/citybound/citybound)                   | Standalone         | AGPLv3     | Rust       |  6124 |        NA | NA                       |
| [StreetMix](https://github.com/streetmix/streetmix)                   | Hosted service     | BSD-3      | JavaScript |   440 |         6 | (Riggs et al. 2016)      |
| [flowmap.blue](https://github.com/FlowmapBlue/flowmap.blue)           | Standalone         | MIT        | TypeScript |    90 |        NA | NA                       |
| [Conveyal Analysis](https://github.com/conveyal/analysis-backend)     | Hosted service     | MIT        | Java       |    19 |        NA | NA                       |
| [PCT](https://github.com/npct/pct-shiny/)                             | Hosted service     | AGPLv3     | R          |    16 |        66 | (Lovelace et al. 2017)   |
| [TrajAnalytics](http://vis.cs.kent.edu/TrajAnalytics/)                | Standalone         | BSD-3      | JavaScript |    NA |         0 | (Shamal et al. 2019)     |
| [Veins](https://github.com/sommer/veins)                              | Standalone         | GPLv2      | C++        |   155 |        NA | NA                       |

Table 4.1: Open source tools for geographic analysis in transport
planning, based on data from Google Scholar, GitHub and web searches and
classified in by their primary user interface. CLI, GUI and WUI refer to
command-line, graphical user and web user interfaces respectively.

It should be clear that the ‘Type’ and ‘Language’ values shown in Table
<a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a> are also fuzzy: open source software
is by nature modular and flexible, meaning that the same piece of code
can take multiple different forms and the same method can be implemented
in multiple languages. The AequilibraE QGIS plugin (Camargo 2015), for
example, is also a Python package. Conversely, the MovingPandas Python
package by Graser (2019) is also a QGIS plugin. The point is that the
*most prominent* category into which each project seemed to fall, based
on documentation, was used. The rest of this section outlines some of
the capabilities of each tool presented in Table
<a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a> based on the author’s reading of
easily available documentation: due to time constraints no systematic
installation tests or benchmarks were undertaken, although this could be
a direction of future research.

An interesting insight provided by the popularity metrics of ‘Stars’
(meaning the number of people who had ‘starred’ the project on GitHub)
and Citations (to the main paper outlining the tool, where available) as
of September 2020 is that the choice of metric has a large impact on
perceived popularity. While MatSIM is perhaps the tool in Table
<a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a> that has most uptake in applied
transport planning, it had only a moderate number of Stars (285)
compared with the number of papers citing the tool’s main reference the
tool, which is in itself a free and open resource (Horni, Nagel, and
Axhausen 2016). A/B Street, by contrast, had more than *twenty times*
the number of Stars on GitHub but no academic paper that could be found
in the public domain at the time of writing. This highlights the fact
that different user communities visit different forums and, furthermore,
many transport practitioners will neither write academic papers not be
active GitHub users, making the uptake of different software projects
even harder to monitor, an issue we return to in Section
<a href="#conclusion">5</a>.

## 4.3 Command-line interface (CLI) tools

Tools based on a *command line interface* (CLI) are designed to be
controlled primarily by typing commands. CLIs predate *graphical user
interfaces* (GUIs), which are controlled by ‘pointing and clicking’
(Sherman 2008). CLIs can take time to learn, especially for people who
have been trained on GUI-based software such as Microsoft Word. After
overcoming often steep ‘learning curves,’ the advantages of CLI-based
tools for *users* become substantial. The approach can be highly
productive, with hundreds of commands only a few keystrokes away and the
benefits of reproducibility and scalability associated with representing
computational workflows in code. Programming also provides flexibility:
the user is not constrained by the options provided in the GUI and in
many CLI-based tools can define new functions. The approach also has
advantages for *developers*: it is substantially easier to write
software without the burden of having to develop a GUI, reducing the
barrier to entry for potential contributors. Ease of development
explains why CLIs represent the most common type of open source tool for
geographic analysis.

The longest standing and still actively maintained CLI tools for
geographic analysis in transport planning shown in Table
<a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a> are **SUMO** (first released in 2001)
and **MATSim** (first released in 2006). Both projects operate at the
‘microscropic’ (street) level and simulate individual vehicles at high
spatial and temporal resolution, although the emphasis of **MATSim** is
more on citywide analysis compared with the emphasis on modelling
traffic at junctions in **SUMO**. There is evidence of uptake of both
projects in applied transport planning contexts, with **MATSim** in
particular being
[cited](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22matsim%22+%22transport+planning%22)
in dozens of applied transport planning papers. Neither project focusses
on geographic analysis but both rely on geographic inputs (detailed road
geometries) and produce geographic outputs.

**MATSim**, which stands for Multi-Agent Transport Simulation, is
perhaps the more ambitious project, enabling the transport systems of
entire cities to be simulated, creating opportunities for detailed model
experiments based on transport networks that can be edited using a
plugin to the [JOSM
GIS](https://github.com/matsim-org/josm-matsim-plugin) (Horni, Nagel,
and Axhausen 2016). **SUMO** is focussed on modelling traffic on road
segments and junctions and although the emphasis is not on geographic
analysis, the inclusion of a geographic road network editor (called
NETEDIT) means that the tool can be used to analyse geographic scenarios
of change (Lopez et al. 2018). With complex installation and usage
instructions, **SUMO** and **MATSim** are both aimed at advanced users.
This has the advantage of enabling many research and (particularly in
the case of **MATSim**) applied use cases due to the flexibility of the
tools, but has the disadvantage of reducing accessibility.

The remaining CLI-based tools in Table <a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a>
are smaller, simpler and more accessible R/Python packages that fit
within the framework of these pre-existing open source software
ecosystems. **OSMnx** is a Python package for downloading and analysing
transport networks from OpenStreetMap that has a focus on urban
transport network analysis (Boeing 2017). **OSMnx** has been used for a
wide range of research and real-world applications, with a focus on
spatial network analysis via functions for calculating a range of
transport network measures. **Movingpandas** is a Python package and
QGIS plug-in for visualising a wide range of movement datasets, with a
focus on trajectory data (Graser 2019). **momepy** is a Python package
for measuring ‘urban morphology,’ meaning the measurement and analysis
of collections of geographic entities that constitute cities
(Fleischmann 2019).

The other Python packages in Table <a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a>
have broader (and to some extent overlapping) remits, aiming to support
a range of transport planning objectives. **UrbanSim** and
**UrbanAccess** are Python packages that are part of the [Urban Data
Science Toolkit](https://github.com/UDST) project, with the former
oriented towards statistical analysis of citywide transport systems and
the latter focused on analyzing geographic transport network data from
an accessibility perspective. The documentation describing these tool
highlights their ability to assist metropolitan planning organizations
(MPOs) to prioritise investments that cost-effectively increase
accessibility for those most in need (Blanchard and Waddell 2017). In
addition to using OSM data, **UrbanAccess** can import and process GTFS
data to calculate multi-modal travel times and other metrics.
[**UrbanPy**](https://github.com/EL-BID/urbanpy) has similar objectives
and includes functionality for spinning-up Docker containers to do
routing using the OSRM routing engine, highlighting the interoperability
between open source tools.

Like **momepy**, the **spaghetti** package (which stands for SPAtial
GrapHs: nETworks, Topology, & Inference) is focussed on street network
analysis, but focusses less on urban morphology and more on
segment-level statistics (Gaboardi et al. 2018). **scikit-mobility**
implements a framework for statistical modelling of travel behaviour,
including functions for estimating movement between geographic zones
using spatial interaction models, as well as route assignment
(Pappalardo et al. 2019).

The JavaScript package **Trip-simulator**, from the not-for-profit
organisation Shared Streets, enables geographic analysis for transport
planning by simulating GPS flows on street networks. Its command-line
interface allows a wide variety of trip types and volumes to be
simulated which can, given a new street network layout, be used to
estimate the impact of changes to the network.

The remaining two CLI-based tools in Table
<a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a> are R packages focussed on applied
transport planning. **stplanr** (which stands for sustainable transport
planning with R) contains a range of functions for processing
origin-destination, routes and route networks. The package takes an
explicitly geographic approach to transport planning and many of the
functions use geographic operations such as buffers and spatial
aggregation in workflows that start with origin-destination data and end
with estimates of travel demand down to the route network level under
different scenarios of change (Lovelace and Ellison 2018).
**opentripplanner** is an R package for multi-modal routing and
accessibility analysis that provides an interface to the OpenTripPlanner
Java library, enabling not only calculation of travel times and route
geometries but also monetary costs and accessibility isochrone maps
where GTFS data allow (Morgan et al. 2019).

## 4.4 Graphical user interface (GUI) tools

Other than A/B Street, all of the GUI-based tools presented in Table
<a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a> are QGIS plugin. This came as a
surprise: given the dominance of GUIs in many areas of computing one
would expect a range of stand-alone transport planning tools to have
been developed (the criterion that tools must be actively maintained to
be considered explains the exclusion of some tools such as Tranus (de la
Barra, P’erez, and Vera 1984)).

A/B Street does not market itself as a transport planning tool but
instead as a game and educational tool. However, that does not mean that
it lacks capabilities. A/B Street combines the real-time capabilities of
MATSim with the usability of online tools such as Streetmix, discussed
in the next section, taking a ‘SimCity’ approach to transport planning,
while still allowing the user to zoom in to single vehicles (while they
are in motion via a moving camera!) and change the geometries of street
layouts with an intuitive in-built editor.

QGIS plugins for transport planning are explicitly focussed on
geographic analysis for transport planning. **AequilibraE**, **QNEAT3**
and the **Networks** plugins provide various transport planning tools
from the mature and popular QGIS GUI-based Geographic Information System
(GIS). **AequilibraE** provides a broad range of functions for
processing transport networks and assigning traffic (Camargo 2015), as
detailed in the project’s substantial [documentation
website](http://aequilibrae.com/python).
[**QNEAT3**](https://root676.github.io/) provides a narrower but well
documented set of algorithms for transport planning applications,
including shortest path, network buffers and OD matrix visualisation.
The **Networks** plugin uses an interface to external software
[**Mulsiw**](https://github.com/crocovert/Musliw) to enable multi-modal
routing and GTFS data import.

The **AwaP** plugin uses data on urban ‘blocks’ (typically buildings) to
calculate indicators relating to walkability. The tool can been used to
compare the urban morphologies of different areas cities from a
walkability perspective (Majic and Pafka 2019).

Finally, the sDNA QGIS plugin provides an interface to the C++ project
sDNA, a tool for spatial network analysis that has been developed to
support transport planning for walking and cycling (Cooper and Chiaradia
2020). A range of route network analysis functions are available,
enabling the user to parameterise models to best represent travel
behaviour at city scales base on the high performance routing between
every vertex on the network. By changing network characteristics and
geometries or adjusting parameters, model experiments can be undertaken
in sDNA to represent scenarios of change (Cooper 2018).

## 4.5 Web user interface (WUI) tools

Installing and running code on sufficiently powerful computers has long
been a barrier preventing people from accessing software, and transport
planning tools are no exception. In this context web user interfaces
(WUIs, by which I mean an in-browser graphical user interface rather
than a web API) can provide multiple advantages in terms of
participatory planning (although cloud-based solutions also pose risks
in terms of concentration of processing and economic power).

Like **A/B Street**,
[**CityBound**](https://github.com/citybound/citybound) takes a gaming
approach to transport planning, with an interactive editor and an
agent-based approach that allows hundreds of vehicles to interact on
city scale networks in real time. Perhaps its most interesting feature
from a transport planner’s perspective is the editing framework, which
offers “the power and expressiveness of professional CAD tools while
being much more intuitive and fun to use.” Also like **A/B Street** the
project does not originate from a transport planning context, instead
approaching city planning from a computer science perspective using
recent developments in digital technology such as
[WebAssembly](https://webassembly.org/) to push boundaries, which in
part explains the project’s popularity among developers as evidenced by
the fact it has more than 6k ‘Stars’ on GitHub.

**Streetmix** is primarily available and used as a free and open web
service hosted at [streetmix.net](https://streetmix.net/), but it is
also an open source software project supported by free software giant
Mozilla that enables anyone to create a locally hosted instance of the
service. Unlike the other projects listed in Table
<a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a>, **Streetmix** does not use 2
dimensional (longitude/latitude) data but instead allows the user to
interactively edit a 1D street profile, from the edge of buildings on
one side to the other side. You can add pavements, cycleways, aesthetic
features such as trees and other items to support more sustainable
planning policies and designs (Riggs, Boswell, and Ross 2016). As
discussed in Section <a href="#conclusion">5</a>, the combination of the
emphasis on participatory design for sustainable futures in
**Streetmix** with the technology for 2D (and even 3D) intiutive editing
in **CityBound** represents a promising possibility for future research
and development.

**Conveyal Analysis** represents a step in that direction, providing a
hosted service for city-wide scenarios of change. With only 19 Stars on
GitHub and limited documentation, however, the **Analysis** tool has
some way to go before it builds a ‘community of practice’ of the type
enjoyed by more established and well-documented projects such as
**MATSim**.

The JavaScript/TypeScript-based projects **flowmap.blue** and
**TrajAnalytics** are interactive, web-based geographic mobility data
visualisation tools at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of size
and complexity. **flowmap.blue** is a lightweight tool that focusses on
ease of use and, via an R package of the same name, inter-operability
for people working with origin-destination data. **TrajAnalytics** is a
large (83 MB zipped) project providing a visualisation framework for
displaying and analysing large trajectory datasets. Unlike
**Streetmix**, which focusses on the individual street level, both
projects are designed for visualising citywide and regional scale
transport systems.

The Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT) is an interactive map-based web tool
designed to support cost effective investment in cycling infrastructure
(Lovelace et al. 2017). The emphasis is on where to build to maximise
cycling uptake. By exploring scenarios of change including Go Dutch — in
which cycling levels are simulated to grow to Dutch levels nationwide —
planners, active travel advocates and other stakeholders build business
cases for investment along desire lines with high cycling potential and
better understand health and environmental benefits of interventions in
different places.

## 4.6 Geographic capabilities

The brief descriptions of CLI, GUI and WUI-based tools for transport
planning above show diversity of approaches to geographic data, ranging
from 1D editing in **Streetmix** to full geographic data editing and
analysis functionality available to users of QGIS-based tools. With
reference to the transport planning process shown in Figure
<a href="#fig:schematic">1.1</a>, the geographic capabilities of the
tools is shown in Table <a href="#tab:capabilities">4.2</a>. The columns
in <a href="#tab:capabilities">4.2</a> broadly match the main stages of
transport planning as follows:

1.  data collection: supported by download (Dld) functionality
2.  modelling/analysis: supported by routing (Rou) and geographic
    analysis (Geo)
3.  evaluation: supported by modelling and data analysis (Mod)
    capabilities
4.  implementation of solutions: supported by visualisation (Vis)

Additional important considerations include the geographic resolution,
support for time series analysis (over seconds to years), the scale at
which the tools are documented to run at and the level of expertise
needed to install, set-up and use the tool. Many tools provide
functionality through documented interfaces to other packages. R has a
mature ecosystem of packages for geographic analysis, with particular
strengths in statistical analysis Bivand (2020) and visualisation
(Lovelace, Nowosad, and Muenchow 2019, Chapter
[8](https://geocompr.robinlovelace.net/adv-map.html)). Likewise, there
is a growing ecosystem of Python packages for geographic analysis
(Garrard 2016), some of which are available as QGIS plugins, placing the
user in an advance GIS.

Another key finding from Table <a href="#tab:capabilities">4.2</a> is
that there is no single tool that every desirable feature of tools for
geographic analysis in transport planning. There is generally a
trade-off between the complexity of the tool and ease-of-use, with
**MATSim** and **SUMO** being sophisticated yet hard to use and
**Streetmix** providing an intuitive interface yet limited geographic
capabilities, for example. There are exceptions: **A/B Street** provides
a user friendly interface and even a ‘demo’ mode inspired by computer
game design yet also has sophisticated functionality, although due to
the nascent nature of the project and focus on education/fun rather than
real-world transport planning these capabilities have yet to be
documented in applied settings.

<table>
<caption>
Table 4.2: Geographic capabilities and features of open source tools for
transport planning. Dld, Rou, Geo, Mod and Vis refer to Downloading,
Routing, Geographic analysis, Modelling and Visualisation capabilities,
respectively. Cell values y, i, and e mean Yes (with in-house
capabilities), yes via Interfaces to other packages/software and Editing
capabilities. a, od, p, s and t refer to Agent, Origin-destination,
Point (transect), Street (segment) and Trajectory as the main level of
geographic resolution of data used by each tool, respectively. Values in
the Time column report whether the tool has inbuilt support and
documentation for incremental time simulations. Scale refers to the most
common scale of analysis that the tool is documented to work at, with
values p, c, n and g referring to Point, City, National and Global
scales respectively. Expertise refers to the level of expertise needed
to install, set-up and run the tool, ranging from 1 (easy) via 2
(intermediate) to 3 (expertise required).
</caption>
<thead>
<tr>
<th style="text-align:left;">
Tool
</th>
<th style="text-align:left;">
Type
</th>
<th style="text-align:left;">
Dld
</th>
<th style="text-align:left;">
Rou
</th>
<th style="text-align:left;">
Geo
</th>
<th style="text-align:left;">
Mod
</th>
<th style="text-align:left;">
Vis
</th>
<th style="text-align:left;">
Resolution
</th>
<th style="text-align:left;">
Time
</th>
<th style="text-align:left;">
Scale
</th>
<th style="text-align:right;">
Expertise
</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
OSMnx
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Python package
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
SUMO
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Standalone
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
e
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
3
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
PostGIS
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
GIS
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
g
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
3
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
UrbanSim
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Python package
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
MovingPandas
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Python package
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
t
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
MATSim
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Standalone
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
e
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
a
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
3
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Scikit-mobility
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Python package
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
a
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
stplanr
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
R package
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
od
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
momepy
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Python package
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Trip-simulator
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
JavaScript package
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
t
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
urbanaccess
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Python package
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
spaghetti
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Python package
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
urbanpy
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Python package
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
A/B Street
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Standalone
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
e
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
a
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
1
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
AequilibraE
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
QGIS plugin
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
QNEAT3
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
QGIS plugin
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Networks plugin
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
QGIS plugin
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
sDNA
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
QGIS plugin
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
AwaP
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
QGIS plugin
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
2
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Citybound
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Standalone
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
e
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
a
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
1
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
StreetMix
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Hosted service
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
p
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
p
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
1
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
flowmap.blue
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Standalone
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
od
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
g
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
1
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Conveyal Analysis
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Hosted service
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
e
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
3
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
PCT
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Hosted service
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
od
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
n
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
1
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
TrajAnalytics
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Standalone
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
t
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
3
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Veins
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
Standalone
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
e
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
i
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
s
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
✓
</td>
<td style="text-align:left;">
c
</td>
<td style="text-align:right;">
3
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Table <a href="#capabilities"><strong>??</strong></a> shows that there
is great diversity of open source tools, even within the limited and
still nascent niche of tools for geographic analysis in transport
planning. There seems to be more diversity *within* each software
ecosystems such as R packages, Python packages and QGIS plugins than
*between* them, despite the fact that software developers within each
ecosystem are linked by an overarching language/approach. Software is
not developed in isolation but in a social context and the collaborative
nature of open source tools tends to encourage solutions that are
mutually supportive rather than competing (Dhir and Dhir 2017). Indeed,
many of the tools presented in Table
<a href="#capabilities"><strong>??</strong></a> have a particular
speciality, ranging from analysis of citywide transport networks in
OSMnx (Boeing 2017) to the analysis of cycling potential in the PCT
(Lovelace et al. 2017) and the visualisation of origin-destination data
in flowmap.blue.

A few of the tools can be seen as general purpose transport planning
tools, with particular strengths. Veins (which uses SUMO behind the
scenes), MATSim and A/B Street are well suited to a wide range of
geographic transport planning tasks, ranging from the simulation of the
impact of new infrastructure on the flow of individual vehicles to
city-wide impacts of new policies. All three have mechanisms to not only
describe but to *change* transport networks interactively and all can
work on scales ranging from single junctions to entire cities (although
at the time of writing, A/B Street struggles to represent the central
areas of large cities such as London, the performance of the other tools
on large cities is not known). Tools focussed on origin-destination data
such as the PCT and flowmap.blue are not constrained by the need to
visualise complex city networks, and can show the transport cities of
entire countries.

This raises the question of scale. Clearly, different tools have
different capabilities and most tools can be used to analyse phenomena
at more than one scale of analysis. Furthermore, although a tool has a
‘most common scale’ that does not mean it cannot be used at larger or
smaller scales. MATSim, for example, is most often used to study
city-level phenomena and requires substantial computing resources to
study regional or even national systems at high temporal resolution, but
that does not mean it *cannot* be done if sufficiently powerful hardware
and set-up resources are available (the same point applies to the other
microsimulation tools SUMO, A/B Street and Veins). And although tools
have a main level (Resolution) of analysis, that does not stop them from
using or producing datasets at higher resolution, the PCT’s production
of data at the route network segment (s) level using OD data as inputs
being a case in point (Morgan and Lovelace 2020)

# 5 Discussion and conclusion

Geographic analysis is an important yet often under-appreciated aspect
of transport planning, and looks set to play a more prominent role in
the future. In the context of urgent policy drivers — including the
obesity crisis, air pollution concerns and the climate emergency that
has been declared by some city authorities — many transport planners
have been tasked with new sustainable transport targets, including
reduced private car use and increasing levels of walking and cycling
(Hickman, Ashiru, and Banister 2011). In the context of calls for
evidence-based policy, open data and citizen science (Banister 2008;
Peters 2020) — and political commitments to and actions implementing
such principles by actors at state and regional levels (Monbiot 2017;
Peters 2020) — there is a growing onus on practitioners to provide
solutions that are transparent, accessible and, participatory.

This poses a challenge to the vendors of proprietary transport planning
software, which tends to be expensive and thereby inaccessible to most
people, monolithic and (to a greater or lesser extent) limited in terms
of geographic capabilities, particularly in relation to publicly
accessible interactive visualisation and adaptability. The new planning
priorities also present opportunities, in terms of institutional
processes (Beddoe et al. 2009), but also new technologies that are
explicitly designed to enable more participatory, transparent and
community-driven transport planning processes. Game-like approaches to
city/street analysis tools such as **A/B Street**, **CityBound** and the
intuitive and popular **Streetmix** web service demonstrate the huge
potential for tools to revolutionise not only *how* transport plans are
developed but *who* can be involved in the planning process. This raises
the question: what would a tool for geographic analysis in transport
planning that was as powerful and ‘playable’ as [**A/B
Street**](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/#ab-street) yet as
user friendly as **Streetmix** look like? Each of the projects outlined
in this paper show that open source solutions to transport planning
needs are advanced, and in a growing number of areas more advanced, than
propriety software. This raises the question: what would a completely
open source, participatory and reproducible landscape for transport
planning look like?

Answers to these broader questions are beyond the scope of this paper,
but the tools and ecosystems outlined in previous sections provide an
indication of what is possible. Insights from open tools that are
already widely used suggest that the continued uptake of open tools will
have substantial benefits in the coming years and decades. Benefits of
the free and open source approach range from the increased opportunities
for participation that tools such as the **PCT** and **Streetmix**
enable, to the possibilities for extending capabilities, as shown by the
various plug-ins that have been developed for tools such as **QGIS** and
**MATSim**.

The research presented in this paper suggests that a shift to open
source planning tools in general, and open source tools for local
planning in particular, could tackle wider problems, including the
‘crisis of participatory planning’ and feelings of dis-empowerment due
to lack of opportunities to engage in democratic processes (Legacy 2016;
Monbiot 2017). Open tools can also support data and software literacy
(Christozov and Rasheva-Yordanova 2017). A key feature of geographic
tools for transport planning is that they encourage users to focus on
local areas, moving beyond ‘one size fits all,’ enabling diverse designs
to fit a wide range of diverse local needs. A key feature of open tools,
and especially open online tools that are easy to use, is that anyone
can use them, encouraging citizen engagement.

From a user perspective, Section <a href="#open-source-tools">4</a>
demonstrates that a wide range tools are available. A potential
limitation of the paradigm shift to open source is the time taken to
understand which tool or combination of tools is most appropriate
particular transport planning tasks. This can take time. On the other
hand, a benefit of the range of free and open options offered is that
users are encouraged to think about and better understand the tools they
are using rather than blindly using established (and perhaps expensive
and dated) ‘tools of the trade.’ From a *developer perspective*, the
community of support and feedback may be more important than current
functionality of tools. The literature shows that R, Python and QGIS
communities have already developed several tools for transport planning
that, when combined with other open source solutions, can solve a wide
range of spatial transport planning problems.

Many other tools and communities exist. A limitation of the paper is
that it is not comprehensive, omitting due to space constraints
consideration of routing engines such as **pgRouting**, **OSRM**,
**GraphHopper** (and related project **OpenRouteService**),
**OpenTripPlanner**, **Valhalla** and the recently developed
**motis**[11] and tools that *can* be applied to transport planning but
which were not designed for transport planning such as the
[**gama**](https://github.com/gama-platform/gama) platform and general
purpose geographic data processing projects. Future research could
review and benchmark such alternative tools for transport planning to
provide valuable insight into which tools work best for different
applications including, critically, how to rapidly decarbonise transport
systems worldwide (Hickman, Ashiru, and Banister 2011).

In terms of further research, a hypothesis raised in this paper is that
open source tools for transport planning, underpinned by the FOSS
philosophy described in Section <a href="#open-source-tools">4</a>, will
continue to gain market share in academic, public sector and consultancy
applications. The paper supports the characterisation of open source
software as collaborative, innovative and evolving (Gancarz 2003). Will
these features of open source tools allow them to out-compete and
eventually dominate in the field of transport planning — as has already
happened in fields including machine learning (e.g. Abadi et al. 2016)
and web development (e.g. Grinberg 2018; Wickham 2020)? Only time and
much-needed further research into the topic will tell. Regardless of the
answer, this paper has conclusively found that high-performance and
innovative open source solutions are already available in the
‘ecological niche’ of geographic analysis for transport planning. The
nascent and rapidly evolving nature of open source transport planning
ecosystems means that there are many fruitful directions of future
research, asking a wide range of related questions, including:

-   What are the relative merits of different tools and combinations of
    tools for different transport planning applications, in terms of
    criteria such as computer/programmer efficiency and public
    accessibility?
-   What scope is there for greater integration and collaboration
    between tools, building on the modular and ‘pluginable’ nature of
    open source software (this questions raises the prospect
    R/Python/QGIS/other interfaces to established transport tools such
    as MATSim, SUMO and sDNA)?
-   How can the growth of open source solutions for geographic transport
    data analysis be monitored, e.g. to identify ‘tipping points’ in
    uptake?
-   What are the barriers to uptake and ‘discoverability’ of leading
    open source tools, including in relation to documentation and case
    studies?
-   In which contexts — e.g. along wealthy/low income, urban/rural,
    democratic/dictatorship continua — are open source tools for
    transport planning, and evidence-based decision-making in general,
    most effective and most needed?

This is clearly a multi-disciplinary area of research, and it is not
immediately clear which methodological approaches — ranging from
action-based research developing “practical solutions to issues of
pressing concern,” e.g. by creating or contributing to the source code
underpinning open source tools (Brydon-Miller, Greenwood, and Maguire
2003), to more conventional literature/software reviews of emerging
ecosystems (e.g. Joo et al. 2020).

Technical/computing approaches could usefully tackle more objective
questions, such as the relative performance of different routing engines
and transport planning APIs. Indeed, there is a need research evaluating
the potential of ‘WebAPI’ based tools for transport planning such as
OpenTripPlanner, mentioned in the [online
version](https://github.com/Robinlovelace/open-gat/blob/master/open_tools.csv)
of Table <a href="#tab:open-tools">4.1</a> but not discussed in this
paper due to space constraints.

Returning to the ‘big picture’ introduced in Section
<a href="#intro">1</a>, it is clear that there are strong arguments for
a paradigm shift in transport planning overall. Academic attention has
tended to focus on changes that are needed in the overall planning
process (Banister 2008; Legacy 2016) rather than changes that are needed
in the transport planning ‘tools of the trade,’ notwithstanding research
advocating for change in transport modelling from practitioner (e.g.
Hollander 2016), academic (e.g. Lovelace, Parkin, and Cohen 2020) and
advocacy (e.g. Beimborn and Kennedy 1996) perspectives.  
Building on prior research and a review of existing open source options,
this paper highlights the importance of not only processes and models,
but also the tools used for designing geographically specific transport
plans. Open source tools generate evidence that is more likely to be
rigorous, transparent, reproducible and shared than evidence generated
by the established proprietary tools (Peters 2020; Brunsdon and Comber
2020). Transport interventions based on such open evidence are more
likely to be effective at meeting policy objectives. Effective
interventions are necessary to improve the environmental and health
performance of transport systems worldwide, to reduce lives lost due to
climate change and non-communicable disease. This paper therefore
concludes that open source tools for geographic analysis in transport
planning can support emerging environmental, health and social
objectives. In other words — alongside wider political and institutional
shifts to decarbonise the economy (Beddoe et al. 2009; Litman 2007) —
open source software can, in addition to providing cost-effective
solutions to 21<sup>st</sup> Century transport planning needs, save
lives.

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[1] Articles about successful transport planners illustrate the point.
Ben Hamilton-Baillie (1955 - 2019), for example, was an influential
transport planner and street designer whose obituary emphasised the
“hundreds of thousands of people who are safer and happier as a result
of his achievements” (Tim Stornor, quoted in
[TransportExtra](https://www.transportxtra.com/publications/local-transport-today/news/60655/obituary-ben-hamilton-baillie/)).

[2] See <https://www.cyclescape.org/> for an example of such a
peer-to-peer transport planning tool.

[3] Transport is a major electoral issue in London and the current
Mayor, Sadiq Kahn, has made tackling air pollution a policy priority.
See
[tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/the-mayors-transport-strategy](https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/the-mayors-transport-strategy).

[4] The current Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, sees transport as a
priority and has plans to make public transport free. See
[paris.fr](https://www.paris.fr/rechercher/transport).

[5] Bogotá has an innovative and prominent transport policy, led by the
two times mayor Enrique Peñalosa, who has led the roll-out of major bus
and cycleway projects in the city. See
[sitp.gov.co](https://www.sitp.gov.co/).

[6] There is of course a close relationship between transport planning
software and models because theoretical models can inform the direction
of software developments, as was the case with the development of
spatial interaction models (Boyce and Williams 2015). Conversely,
‘upstream’ developments in computer languages affect the range of models
that can be implemented, as can be seen with the current shift towards
cloud-based and more visual and interactive transport models such as the
open source [Streetmix](https://streetmix.net) and the Institute of
Transport Engineers endorsed [StreetPlan](https://streetplan.net) tools
for visualising 1D street layouts and cloud-based transport planning
services such as [Remix](https://www.remix.com/).

[7] UTPS stands for the UMT (Urban Mass Transportation Administration,
an agency of the DoT responsible for transport planning) Transportation
Planning System (UTPS).

[8] Thanks to Crispin Cooper, author of sDNA, for raising this barrier.

[9] Some tools can be used through multiple interfaces but most have a
dominant interface type.

[10] See <https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software> for a full
definition and context.

[11] See <https://jakobmiksch.eu/post/openstreetmap_routing/> for an
overview or routing engines for OpenStreetMap data.

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