life | Robin Lovelace

Reflections on 2023

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Like last year’s reflections post, I’m going to keep this one short and use it as a chance to reflect on what I’ve been up to over the last 12 months, what I’ve been working on, research I’ve contributed to, and hopes for next year.

Research

It was a productive year for my research outputs, in which I was co-author on the following research outputs:

Cycle network policy, planning and investment transformed by the Propensity to Cycle Tool, not an academic paper but a case study about the pathways from research to impact, as part of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF). The work was assessed as being a 4* REF Impact Case Study according to the amazing team at the University of Leeds who supported me to condense 5+ years of work into a single report (Lovelace et al. 2023).
A road segment prioritization approach for cycling infrastructure, a paper led by my PhD student Hussein Mahfouz, that explores methods for prioritising investment in active travel networks that take into account equity and cost effectiveness (Mahfouz, Lovelace, and Arcaute 2023). It took a LONG and occasionally frustrating amount of time to get through the peer review process but I’m really happy that this is now published in a top journal (JTG).
Contraflows and cycling safety: Evidence from 22 years of data involving 508 one-way streets is a paper led by my former PhD student Caroline Tait (Tait et al. 2023). It is, to the best of our knowledge, the most detailed data-driven assessment of the safety of contraflow cycling interventions which is highly policy relevant: it challenges the unfounded assumption that contraflow cycleways should not be approved on safety grounds, especially in places like London where there are existing cycling communities and high potential.
Where to invest in cycle parking: A portfolio management approach to spatial transport planning was the result of an Master’s dissertation project at ITS, it’s a solid method for prioritising in cycle parking that I hope to see implemented soon (Ito, Morgan, and Lovelace 2023).
Road lighting and cycling: A review of the academic literature and policy guidelines is the first review into the research on street lighting and cycling led by my colleague Eugeni (Vidal-Tortosa and Lovelace 2023).
Packaging code for reproducible research in the public sector is not actually published yet, but I’m very proud of this collaboration between me, Federico Botta from the University of Exeter, Arthur Turrell of the Data Science Campus, and Laura Gilbert from the data science team in No. 10 (10DS) (Botta et al., n.d.)

Second job

2023 was an exhilarating year work-wise, as I took on a new role as a civil servant, in addition to my main job as an associate professor in transport data science at the University of Leeds. The new part time role is with Active Travel England, the government agency tasked with creating a step change in walking and cycling nationwide. I had a broad remit but my main aim during the first part was to build the data and digital team, which I’m happy to say, job done. We started 2023 with only 1 person with a data and digital remit (me) and end it with a small but effective team of 7.

There were many proud moments over the last 12 months in Active Travel England, one of the greatest being the launch of the collaboration between Active Travel England and the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and AI. Building on my links with the ATI as a Turing Fellow, and my previous working with Dustin Carlino and others on the prototype ActDev tool, we secured funding for a 2 year project for the ATI to develop the Active Travel Infrastructure Platform (ATIP).

From the Active Travel England press release:

This [collaboration] will enable the development of new functionality in the Active Travel Infrastructure Platform (ATIP), which helps councils to map out proposed schemes and see the impact they could have locally.

These new tools will be paired with existing data sources such as OpenStreetMap, to create innovative solutions that will help build the evidence needed to meet national government’s objectives on active travel, including for 50% of short trips in urban areas to be made by walking, wheeling and cycling by 2030. The investment will demonstrate how new software engineering and data science techniques can support evidence-based planning and support Active Travel England’s mission.

I played a role in securing the funding, writing the grant funding agreement, submitting it (with lots of support from ATE colleagues) and getting people in the ATI and ATE onboard. The most credit goes to Dustin and everyone involved, it’s still a work in progress, but the first version of the ATIP is now live and being used by local authorities across the country to plan walking and cycling schemes.

See the open source code underlying the functionality plus links to a live web app at github.com/acteng/atip.

Like the Propensity to Cycle Tool (which I got to demo to the then Secretary of State for transport in 2017), the ATIP project is highly conducive to collaborative planning and live demos. We got a chance to show off the tool during a live demo with the government minister responsible for active travel, Jesse Norman (now Guy Opperman since November 2023).

Home at last

It was a more relaxing end to the year than 2022 which, as outlined in the previous year’s reflections, was largely spent unpacking. I’m happy to say that we’re now settled into our new home in the Chapeltown Cohousing project which provides an amazing base for our life in Leeds. It has a shared garden and the cars are parked outside, meaning plenty of space for Kit, now aged 2, to run around without worries about road traffic danger.

My wife Katy and I are also now the proud owners of an e-bike, an early Christmas present which is a low carbon and (thanks to the cycle to work scheme) cost effective way of getting around, allowing us to combine biking to work with the nursery run.

Hopes and dreams for 2024

In 2024 I plan to focus more on my academic research but will retain a role in ATE to support on data science and digital innovation. My dream is spend more time with my son Kit and on the work side to build a team developing cutting edge and internationally applicable research and tools for sustainable transport planning. Now settled into the new home and into my new roles, it’s all doable, just requires hard work, focus, and good work-life balance.

References

Botta, Federico, Robin Lovelace, Laura Gilbert, and Arthur Turrell. n.d. “Packaging Code for Reproducible Research in the Public Sector.” https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.16205.

Ito, Yuhei, Malcolm Morgan, and Robin Lovelace. 2023. “Where to Invest in Cycle Parking: A Portfolio Management Approach to Spatial Transport Planning.” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 50 (6): 1438–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083221138575.

Lovelace, Robin, M Birkin, Joseph Talbot, and Malcolm Morgan. 2023. “Cycle Network Policy, Planning and Investment Transformed by the Propensity to Cycle Tool.” https://results2021.ref.ac.uk/impact/847d1191-7f25-46ba-a399-b481125edc8f?page=1.

Mahfouz, Hussein, Robin Lovelace, and Elsa Arcaute. 2023. “A Road Segment Prioritization Approach for Cycling Infrastructure.” Journal of Transport Geography 113 (December): 103715. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2023.103715.

Tait, Caroline, Roger Beecham, Robin Lovelace, and Stuart Barber. 2023. “Contraflows and Cycling Safety: Evidence from 22 Years of Data Involving 508 One-Way Streets.” Accident Analysis & Prevention 179 (January): 106895. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2022.106895.

Vidal-Tortosa, Eugeni, and Robin Lovelace. 2023. “Road Lighting and Cycling: A Review of the Academic Literature and Policy Guidelines.” Journal of Cycling and Micromobility Research, December, 100008. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcmr.2023.100008.

Reflections on 2022

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a whirlwind year. It was my first full year being a dad, I moved house, and got a new job. All this left precious little time for reflection during most of 2022, let alone a write of them. This post rights that wrong! It outlines some of the key things that have happened over the past 12 months in my world, celebrates the successes and, as tradition dictates, speculates on 2023. More prosaically it provides a heads-up on what I’ve been up to.

Like last years reflections I’ll focus on professional/vocational/technical things that I think will be of most interest to people. There are a few personal/family updates worth putting out there also. On every level it’s been an amazing year. Let’s dive in!

Jittering

Much of my work has involved processing origin-destination (OD) data. OD data underlies the highest impact project I have worked on, the Propensity to Cycle Tool (hosted at pct.bike) and follow-on projects¹ ²³. To re-cap, the PCT uses open access OD data representing trips between small administrative zones in England as the basis of a model that estimates cycling potential at zone, desire line, route and, most importantly, route network levels. As outlined in the figure below

Moving house

This last milestone of 2022 was in many ways the biggest. A house is more than just a place sleep: it can be a foundation, a source of strength, a place to call home. So it was a big moment for me and Katy when we got the keys to our new place, on 5th December.

Getting the keys was just the start of the moving process though. Thanks to Leeds City Council, and City Connect which is joining up Leeds’ patchy active travel network, we borrowed an electric cargo cycle, Raleigh’s Pro Electric Cargo Trike. With a 900 litre front carrier, this futuristic machine had the capacity to make our move a lot easier than if we had relied on a car alone.

I’m grateful to CityConnect and encourage anyone needing to regularly shift moderate loads, up to around 100 kg, to do some research into the revolutionary potential of e-cargos to increase the efficiency and fun of moving stuff. You can sign-up for a trial at leeds.gov.uk/evtrials.

References

Lovelace, R. et al. The Propensity to Cycle Tool: An open source online system for sustainable transport planning. Journal of Transport and Land Use 10, (2017).

Goodman, A. et al. Scenarios of cycling to school in England, and associated health and carbon impacts: Application of the ‘Propensity to Cycle Tool’. Journal of Transport & Health 12, 263–278 (2019).

Lovelace, R., Talbot, J., Morgan, M. & Lucas-Smith, M. Methods to Prioritise Pop-up Active Transport Infrastructure. Transport Findings 13421 (2020) doi:10.32866/001c.13421.

Reflections on 2021 🎇

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

ActDev
First solo authored paper
New fellowship: placement in the No. 10 Data Science team (10DS)
Software development
Geocomputation with R Second Edition
Becoming a father
Just look up ☄
References

It’s been another crazy year for many people with lifestyles still disrupted by COVID, huge advances, setbacks and challenges faced collectively by people worldwide.

It has been an amazing year for me and my family. Before the hectic rush (and sometimes grind) of daily working life returns, I wanted to put together a few thoughts on things that happened in 2021 and hopes for 2022 and beyond.

Long story short, it involved various academic and practical accomplishments plus the most rewarding event of my life so far, becoming a dad (skip to the end for more on that)!

ActDev

In the first few months of 2021 I led a project called ActDev, which involved research into the levels of transport sustainability associated with new housing developments. The 4 month project resulted in a web application that is publicly available at cyipt.actdev.bike. Currently this is just a prototype of a larger tool that we hope to develop in 2022. The research and thinking underlying the tool is outlined in a pre-print led by my colleague Joey Talbot¹ and showcased in the promotional video shown below.

The project also involved working with Dustin Carlino and using A/B Street a traffic simulation tool that allows you to redesign streets and transport patterns to inform policies. Building on the ‘zonebuilder paper’ co-authored by Dustin,² which inspired the tweet below, I hope do more work with A/B Street in 2022.

Choices of zones + boundaries affect research findings + maps. Choose wisely! pic.twitter.com/ga8NZesPoX
— Robin Lovelace (^{robinlovelace?}) August 6, 2021

First solo authored paper

Collaborating with others is one of the most rewarding parts of academic research. I have published over two dozen papers with many people over the years, and 5 fully peer reviewed papers in 2021. These include a paper on modelling the health impacts of active travel led by James Woodcock at the University of Cambridge,,³ and three papers led by Eugeni Vidal-Tortosa;⁴;⁵.⁶ As lead supervisor I was very happy to see Eugeni pass his viva in November (another 2021 milestone for me). Additional papers from 2021, including pre-prints, can be seen on my website and here.

One of the most rewarding papers, however, was on that I authored solo.⁷ In it, I review 25 open source tools for geographic analysis in transport planning and discuss the future potential of open source software for guiding effective policy interventions. The paper has received some attention online, as can be seen in the Tweet below, and not just from the academic research community: experienced transport modeller Tom Van Vuren, for example, picked-up on the paper and we hope to take the conversation about uptake of open and transparent software for transport modelling forward in 2022.

Stoked to announce that the new #openaccess paper “Open source tools for geographic analysis in transport planning” has just been published 🎉

Paper: https://t.co/kZy2kkyjDy
Code: https://t.co/yOFtKbBbYc
My first ever solo-authored paper! pic.twitter.com/3fHSbP0UTG
— Robin Lovelace (^{robinlovelace?}) January 19, 2021

I also hope to do more research that is policy relevant, leading to the next topic in my reflections on the year just gone by.

New fellowship: placement in the No. 10 Data Science team (10DS)

An exciting new project started for me in 2021, as I was awarded an 18 month ‘10DS Fellowship’ to help central government make better use data science to support evidence-based decision-making.

Really excited about this: for the next ~18 months I will be working with the 10DowningStreet? Data Science team, DataSciCampus?, ESRC? and others on the new 10DS Fellowship. Looking forward to working with Federico, Alex and everyone on data science in government 🚀 https://t.co/h7skJ0rbwA
— Robin Lovelace (^{robinlovelace?}) November 18, 2021

The responses replying to that tweet from acquaintances working in related fields, plus emails from colleagues at the University of Leeds, provide a strong motivation to work hard to move things forward. New methods and datasets have great potential to be harnessed to help tackle entrenched challenges in the 21^st century. I hope my background and skills will enable me to make a positive difference.

Watch this space for projects that I end up working on as part of this fellowship (that can be published after clearance from No. 10). The placement phase of the fellowship starts in January, and it looks like there will be many exciting opportunities for high impact research. I hope to document lessons learned from the experience in articles for the organisations supporting the fellowship: the ESRC, ADR UK, the Alan Turing Institute (where I was also awarded a fellowship in 2021) and the ONS’s Data Science Campus.

Software development

In addition to research published in academic papers, I have also worked hard on software development and teaching materials. I was amazed and slightly humbled to hear that stplanr, an R package I developed to support strategical cycle network planning in the UK, had been used in research into access to potentially life-saving TB clinics in Malawi.

When a tool first built for one purpose (cycle network planning in Europe) gets used for something totally different (calculating distance to tuberculosis clinics in Africa) 🚀

Paper: https://t.co/8gaRigYXVK
Package: https://t.co/t8UC0JGjNg #RStats package {stplanr} in action! pic.twitter.com/JqBgv7CE9r
— Robin Lovelace (^{robinlovelace?}) September 10, 2021

What better motivation could there be for developing open source software for reproducible data analysis and policy interventions?

Geocomputation with R Second Edition

Perhaps less exciting than starting new projects is ‘finishing’ existing ones. In this case the project is the popular book Geocomputation with R which, alongside other open source teaching materials of the type published on bookdown.org, helps reduce financial barriers to accessing textbooks by providing teaching content that anyone can read.

Jakub, Jannes and I have signed a contract to work on a second edition and we’ve made good progress, as shown below (one new year’s resolution: publish the 2nd edition!).

🏗️ Geocomputation with R update 🏗️ we've recently updated key parts of Chapter 7 on the key topic of coordinate reference systems (CRSs). Updated figure below, plus lots more in the chapter, shows importance of understanding them! https://t.co/pffHqeF8YT #Rstats #rspatial pic.twitter.com/DVgHU5lvn1
— Robin Lovelace (^{robinlovelace?}) December 30, 2021

Becoming a father

The most important event in the year for me was becoming a dad.

Big personal news: katylvlace? and I have had a baby, welcome to the world Kit 🎉 Focussed on nappies and supporting the family for the next while 💚💚💚 Parenthood is amazing, makes me more committed to research for a sustainable future 🌱 Looking forward to it all! pic.twitter.com/sJJZNZZV04
— Robin Lovelace (^{robinlovelace?}) October 14, 2021

It has been a life-changing experience: being responsible for another (little and very cute) person has certainly shifted my perspective on the world, made me prioritise my time more carefully, and made it harder to plan.

My wife Katy and I have worked closely as a team and, despite talk of the ‘baby bomb’ impacting our relationship, little Kit has brought us closer together ♥

Despite inevitable challenges, it’s been the most rewarding thing we’ve done so far, and we’re only 3 months in! Having a little one around encourages long-term thinking, and Kit has strengthened my commitment to research supporting a more sustainable world.

Just look up ☄

Having a baby around on New Year’s Eve, plus the fact that we start the new year in the midst of a pandemic, led to scaled-back plans to celebrate the arrival of 2022. To celebrate, Katy and I watched Don’t Look Up, a sci-fi film satirising so-far sluggish policy responses to threats identified thanks to scientific research, such as climate change.

Having heard great things about it from friends talking about it and seeing positive and provoking comments on social media, with the hashtag #DontLookUp☄, we decided to watch it as part of our NYE celebrations. The film contains the humorous yet inspiring song below by Ariana Grande.

Never thought I would hear these lyrics in a catchy pop song in 2021:

Get your head out of your ass, listen to the goddam qualified scientists

So I’m prepared for anything in the coming year. Optimistic that with hard work, collective intelligence, empathy, and a desire to collaborate on solving tricky problems, the future can be bright. Bring on 2022!

References

Talbot, J. et al. Active Travel Oriented Development: Assessing the suitability of sites for new homes. (2021) doi:10.31219/osf.io/7fuq5.

Lovelace, R., Tennekes, M. & Carlino, D. ClockBoard: A zoning system for urban analysis. (2021) doi:10.31219/osf.io/vncgw.

Woodcock, J., Aldred, R., Lovelace, R., Strain, T. & Goodman, A. Health, environmental and distributional impacts of cycling uptake: The model underlying the Propensity to Cycle tool for England and Wales. Journal of Transport & Health 22, 101066 (2021).

Vidal Tortosa, E., Lovelace, R., Heinen, E. & Mann, R. P. Infrastructure is not enough: Interactions between the environment, socioeconomic disadvantage and cycling participation in England. Journal of Transport and Land Use (2021) doi:10.5198/jtlu.2021.1781.

Vidal Tortosa, E., Lovelace, R., Heinen, E. & Mann, R. P. Cycling behaviour and socioeconomic disadvantage: An investigation based on the English National Travel Survey. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 152, 173–185 (2021).

Vidal Tortosa, E., Lovelace, R., Heinen, E. & Mann, R. P. Socioeconomic inequalities in cycling safety: An analysis of cycling injury risk by residential deprivation level in England. Journal of Transport & Health 23, 101291 (2021).

Lovelace, R. Open source tools for geographic analysis in transport planning. Journal of Geographical Systems (2021) doi:10.1007/s10109-020-00342-2.