Who is our transport system really built for?
Using smart data to map how people travel, and where transport lets them down
Dr Clara Peiret-García | UCL | SDR UK Fellow
The challenge
Transport is planned around the daily commuter. But in England in 2024, commutes made up only 12% of trips, according to the National Travel Survey.
The rest, such as school runs, shopping, caring for relatives, getting to appointments and shift work, get far less attention. When policy is designed around one kind of journey, people making the others can be left with services that don’t fit their lives.
Dr Peiret-García’s research asks: how do different communities travel, and how well does the transport system serve them?
The idea
| We already have detailed maps of who lives in each neighbourhood. Researchers use them to group small areas by the kind of people who live there. Nobody has built the same thing for how people travel. Dr Peiret-García will build it. Using smart data from mobile devices and travel survey data, she will find common patterns in how people move around and group neighbourhoods by those patterns. She will then link them to what is known about the people who live there, so we can see both who is travelling and how. |
Three things Clara will do
01 | Find travel patterns
Look at anonymised location data from mobile phones and travel survey data to see how people in each area move around: how they travel, how far, and what for. Then group areas that travel in similar ways.
02 | Link them to communities
Link each travel profile to what we know about the people who live in each area, such as age, income and work, using official data from the 2021 census.
03 | Test the transport system
Use this analysis to see where today’s transport system meets travellers’ needs, and where it falls short.
Why smart data?
Surveys such as the National Travel Survey tell us a lot about who travels, but not much about where.
Data from mobile phones is the opposite: it shows movement in fine detail but says little about who is moving. Putting the two together makes up for the limits of each. It becomes possible to see the sort of person who is travelling and where.
What could change?
Making transport fairer and cutting carbon emissions both depend on understanding how people get around.
This research could give England its first neighbourhood-level picture of everyday travel. It could help policymakers and transport bodies:
- check that measures to cut carbon emissions don’t leave some communities behind.ling White Paper passed over speculative trading altogether. The ambition of this work is to give policymakers the evidence to understand the problem and protect people.
- find the communities that current transport serves poorly
- direct new routes, services and investment to where they are most needed
Clara’s view
“We tend to have a very car-centric, commuter-centric vision of travel behaviour, but there is much more to it. School runs, grocery shopping trips, or family errands are all part of most people’s day-to-day life and usually involve segments of society who are typically overlooked, like children, older adults, or women. I hope this research will provide visibility to those behaviours and help advancing policy towards more inclusive transport policies.”
Dr Clara Peiret-García is a Research Fellow in Urban Analytics at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at UCL, where she works on the TRACK-UK project. Her research explores the many different ways people move around towns and cities.
“I am most excited about creating a useful data product, based on rigorous analysis, that can help us move towards more inclusive transport systems. ”
Working with SDR UK’s data services
| Dr Peiret-García’s research will work with data from SDR UK’s national data services, including: Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service (HASP) HASP provides access to the Locomizer and Spectus data, both of which are built from the movements of mobile devices. Geographic Data Service (GeoDS) GeoDS publishes the 2021 Output Area Classification, which it developed with the Office for National Statistics. It groups small areas across the UK by the characteristics of the people who live there. Alongside these, the project will use survey data such as the National Travel Survey. |
From research to action
Dr Peiret-García will build an open, interactive tool for exploring where each profile is found, and will share what she finds in academic papers, at conferences and through illustrations.
The aim is not simply to describe how people travel. It is to help make transport work for the people who rely on it.
At a glance
Researcher
Dr Clara Peiret-García
Institution
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL
Theme
Population and mobility
Research period
2026 to 2027
SDR UK Fellowship
Up to £200,000Working with
HASP · GeoDS · Locomizer · Spectus · National Travel Survey
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