Transport Scotland had an important, yet complex, question to answer.  How should the public transport network in Scotland be developed over the next twenty years to make it accessible to more people, encourage more sustainable travel choices and support the Scottish economy?  It launched a Strategic Transport Project Review and appointed Jacobs to help it gather the data and insight it needed to enable ministers to make evidence-based decisions about future investments in public transport services.

The challenge for Jacobs was enormous.  Existing public transportation modelling tools had considerable limitations, and public transport behaviour could not be reported or analysed at national, regional and local levels.  Jacobs therefore set out to create a new tool for analysing, modelling and displaying transportation data that could be used easily by many teams for different purposes during the Strategic Transport Project Review and other projects in the future.

A specialist geographic information system (GIS) team at Jacobs built the new solution using Esri’s ArcGIS software and ArcGIS web apps in combination with other technologies.  Called the National Public Transport Accessibility Tool (NaPTAT), it considers over 2 million potential journey origin points (from a 200m x 200m grid), takes into account the frequency of public transport services from over 53,000 public transport stops and calculates journey times to over 7,000 key destinations relating to employment, education, healthcare, retail and food stores.

Jacobs used the Network Analyst capabilities of ArcGIS Pro to calculate the distance and walking or cycling time between each point of journey origin and the nearest public transport stops, within a threshold distance.  It then used the Network Analyst outputs and Python scripting to calculate specific accessibility scores based on the number of public transport stops nearby, the distance away and the frequency of services at these locations.  “ArcGIS Pro was one of the most important solutions we used, as it helped identify public transport in the vicinity of each point of origin, as well as the destinations that can be directly accessed by walking or cycling from any of the origin points,” explains Jaime Rodriguez Gozalo, Principal GIS Consultant at Jacobs.

Next, Jacobs used ArcGIS Online to build a web app that enables people to visualise the transportation data on an interactive map of Scotland alongside relevant third party data, such as the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.  Users can zoom into the map, turn different layers of data on and off and interrogate the data to gain insight.

As a further extension to NaPTAT, Jacobs also created a series of interactive ArcGIS Dashboards, enabling users to not only view the data but also customise it for their own study.  One dashboard displays the current performance of public transport in Scotland, while another shows comparisons between the current status (baseline results) and modelled improvement scenarios.

Improved understanding of public transport accessibility
ArcGIS Pro and Network Analyst provide the core analysis capabilities of the NaPTAT solution, revealing just how accessible public transport services are, at each location and for discrete groups, such as people travelling to employment in urban areas, as compared to rural jobs.  Recognising the key role played by ArcGIS in NaPTAT, Kyle Chesney, Principal Transport Planner at Jacobs, says, “The spatial components of the tool were imperative to assist in analysing the public transport accessibility across Scotland.”

Clear visualisations of complex, nationwide data
ArcGIS Online is another core component of the NaPTAT solution, as it has enabled Jacobs to display the results of its nationwide transportation analysis in a highly visual way, on interactive maps and dashboards.  Consequently, it is much easier for users to identify previously hidden patterns and accessibility issues.  “We were not only able to create one single, detailed database of results, but we were able to really go to town using Esri’s online suite of applications to display this in the best way possible for all the teams involved in the project,” says Leigh Wilson, GIS Analyst, Jacobs.

A flexible, easy-to-use analysis tool
Using ArcGIS Online, Jacobs has been able to build a tool that is incredibly easy for people from a wide variety of teams to use, without having to reach out to the GIS team for support.  The ArcGIS Dashboards for example, give users just the information they need, in a format that they can easily interact with to find the answers to their questions.  “The data, information and conclusions can all be interrogated, filtered and used by anyone,” Wilson says.  “You really don’t need to know how to use GIS to analyse these results or make any sort of calculations.”

Tangible evidence to inform future transport investments
Most importantly, the NaPTAT solution has met the needs of Transport Scotland and is now being used to gather evidence to inform new public investments.  For example, users can clearly see on the ArcGIS Dashboard that proposed changes to the transportation network in the Edinburgh and South East region will enable over 25,000 more people to access a hospital in under 30 minutes, in what will be a major improvement to the public transport network.