About NPT

The Tool

The Network Planning Tool for Scotland (NPT) is a planning support system, research project, and web application to support strategic active travel network planning. The 2023 version is focused on cycle network planning and builds on the Propensity to Cycle Tool for England and Wales. NPT provides evidence on levels of cycling and potential down to the road network nationwide across Scotland. It is designed to be used by local authorities, community groups and other organisations to help them plan for cycling.

See the manual for more information on how to use the tool.

The Team

Dr Robin Lovelace, Associate Professor of Transport Data Science, University of Leeds.

Robin is project lead.

Dr Malcolm Morgan, Senior Research Fellow in Transport and Spatial Analysis, University of Leeds.

Malcolm is a specialist in GIS with an interest in low carbon transport and housing.

Intellectual Property

The research and software underpinning the NPT tool is described in the following papers:

The Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT) for England and Wales (Lovelace 2016; Lovelace et al. 2017; Goodman et al. 2019)
The 'overline' method for generating and visualising route networks (Morgan and Lovelace 2020)
The 'jittering' method for disaggregating and adding geographic detail to origin-destination data (Lovelace et al. 2022)

The NPT builds on the Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT) for England and Wales which was funded by the Department for Transport, the development of which was led by Dr Robin Lovelace at the University of Leeds.

Non-transferable and non-exclusive rights to use background intellectual property are granted for the project's sole purpose. The arising intellectual property will be owned by the University of Leeds, Sustrans, or jointly, depending on who generated or developed it. The University of Leeds developed the code underlying the NPT tool as open source software licensed under the terms of the AGPLv3, as outlined below, to ensure public benefit arising from public investment in the tool and improvements to the underlying methods and software. The terms of any license agreement will be negotiated in good faith and will be fair and reasonable, taking into account the scientific and financial contributions of the University of Leeds and other parties.

Open Source Policy

Like the PCT, the NPT tool is open source and licensed under the terms of the AGPLv3 to encourage community contributions and ensure public benefit arising from public investment in the tool, as outlined below.

The NPT Scotland project is open source, and the code is available on GitHub. The code is licensed under the Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3.0 which enables anyone to use, modify and share the code for any purpose, subject to the conditions in the license, including the requirement that any modified versions of the code must be made available under the same license. See the full license in the project's open source repositories on GitHub in the bullet points below:

Data processing and modelling code license
Web app code license

This means that you are free to copy and re-use the code but that if you use a version of the code, you must make the source code publicly available.

Feedback and Contributions

We encourage feedback and contributions to the project:

For general feedback please fill in our 5 minute feedback survey
Feature requests and bug reports can be made via the issue tracker.
Code contributions can be made via Pull Requests to the GitHub repository containing the web app.
Questions and discussions are welcome in the Discussions section of the project's GitHub repo
For general enquiries you can contact us on: nptscotland@gmail.com

References

Lovelace, Robin. ‘Mapping out the Future of Cycling’. Get Britain Cycling, 2016.

Goodman, Anna, Ilan Fridman Rojas, James Woodcock, Rachel Aldred, Nikolai Berkoff, Malcolm Morgan, Ali Abbas, and Robin Lovelace. ‘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 (1 March 2019): 263–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2019.01.008.

Lovelace, Robin, Anna Goodman, Rachel Aldred, Nikolai Berkoff, Ali Abbas, and James Woodcock. ‘The Propensity to Cycle Tool: An Open Source Online System for Sustainable Transport Planning’. Journal of Transport and Land Use 10, no. 1 (1 January 2017). https://doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.2016.862.

Lovelace, Robin, Rosa Félix, and Dustin Carlino.. ‘Jittering: A Computationally Efficient Method for Generating Realistic Route Networks from Origin-Destination Data’. Findings, 8 April 2022, 33873. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.33873.

Morgan, Malcolm, and Robin Lovelace. ‘Travel Flow Aggregation: Nationally Scalable Methods for Interactive and Online Visualisation of Transport Behaviour at the Road Network Level’. Environment & Planning B: Planning & Design, July 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808320942779.