UrbanTide has built an active travel data insights platform that will support Sustrans and SPT in their goal to increase active travel on school runs across Strathclyde.

We’re delighted to announce a new partnership with Sustrans, a leading charity dedicated to making it easier to walk and cycle in the UK. 

We’ll be supporting Sustrans with its goal of using current active travel data insights to increase walking and cycling on school runs across the entire SPT (Strathclyde Partnership for Transport) area. 

We've buit Sustrans and SPT an innovative new data insights platform, that will allow them to transform how children travel to school by providing insights into current school travel patterns so interventions can be targeted where they can make the biggest difference.

School runs: The biggest opportunity for change

The school run represents one of the biggest opportunities to encourage healthier, greener travel habits within communities. With thousands of school journeys taking place every day across the Strathclyde region, shifting these trips toward active travel options can have a huge impact on traffic congestion, air quality, and children's health.

Sustrans has been monitoring school travel through the ‘Hands Up Scotland Survey’ since 2008, creating the largest national dataset on school travel in the country. Now, UrbanTide has built a data insights platform that will enable sustrans to turn 15 years of invaluable survey data into actionable data intelligence.

Introducing the 'Active Travel in Schools Across Strathclyde' Platform

This new data platform provides a comprehensive data visualisation tool that will enable Sustrans and its partners to identify schools with the highest potential for increasing cycling and walking levels. 

For each school, the dashboard brings together multiple datasets so users can see school travel trends, including:

• A comparison of active and motorised travel modes used by pupils across Scotland to commute to school and nursery over the past three years, based on data from the Hands Up Scotland Survey
• A breakdown of the percentage of pupils in each SIMD quintile (Q1-Q5), highlighting the distribution of pupils across varying levels of depravation

The dashboard will also do the following:

• help delivery partners see trends in active travel across schools to target interventions and also provide insight into what others are doing to encourage behaviour change
• help SPT coordinate interventions (as well as deciding on scale of interventions required) and monitoring/evaluation
• Supports data sharing and collaboration for Sustrans and SPT and their delivery partners.

One user of the new dashboard has said:

"The dashboard will show which partners are working where and help us identify which activities are making a difference. It will hopefully help partners collaborate more effectively. Data will be useful to those working to promote existing active travel routes and in the development of new ones."

To see how UrbanTide is facilitating similar active travel projects in the UK, take a look at Cycling Scotland's Cycling Open Data portal and the Active travel project management platform we built for SEStran.