Video: Globally scalable software for sustainable transport

As part of LIDA’s 2017 seminar series, Dr Mark Padgham was invited to deliver a presentation on “Globally scalable software for sustainable transport”.

Open source software and increasingly open access datasets have made digital tools for transport planning available to more people than ever before. However, many of the available products are limited by the scale at which they can operate. Recent developments such as the UrbanSim data science toolkit (written primarily in Python) and the Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT) online mapping tool for prioritising where to build new cycle paths (written in R) have demonstrated that open source software can scale to model transport systems, to city/regional and national levels respectively. This seminar presents an approach to modelling transitions away from fossil fuels which involves less driving but more walking and cycling that can scale globally.

Dr Mark Padgham is a physicist, ecologist and software engineer from Salzburg University. He has been researching mathematics and software for modelling movement patterns for over two decades. He is a prolific programmer, as illustrated by his recently published R packages dodgr and osmdata. The latter will be of interest to anyone following developments in open data: it makes data from the worldwide mapping project OpenStreetMap more accessible than ever before. Mark currently runs a research project on global road infrastructure data.

You can watch Dr Padgham’s seminar in the video below.