Identify which bus routes directly serve each OD pair

[Hussein-Mahfouz]

The current approach is:

• Get geometry of a route and identify areas (MSOA / LSOA etc) that it passes through (using a spatial intersection).
  • The order is important and it is used to create OD pairs that can be served directly (no transfer) by that route. This is done for every route.

Feedback from Malcolm is that this is too rigid - a person bordering an LSOA may be able to use the route, even though it doesn't intersect with the LSOA. Alternative options include:

Option 1: Buffering

• Option 1.1: Buffer the route geometry before doing a spatial intersection.

  • this will not be very accurate as a person may not always be able to walk to the neighboring LSOA in a reasonable time (e.g. if there is a river / motorway in the way)

• Option 1.2: Create buffer around LSOA a. 600m buffer around population-weighted centroid b. 100m buffer around LSOA boundary c. dissolve / union the result and use that to intersect with route geometry

Option 2: Get routes directly from routing engine results

We could see which buses are actually being used. We could do routing with max_rides = 1 to return direct routes only

• Computational load
  • Need to balance number of routes requested with computational load - 3 is a good number
  • I could limit the routing to OD pairs with high commuting numbers (what is high?)
• Other issues
  • The routing engine can give you many routes from A to B, not just the fastest one (the PT routing algorithm doesn't necessarily return the best n routes)

[Hussein-Mahfouz]

This is done here: https://github.com/Hussein-Mahfouz/drt-potential/blob/main/code/demand_on_buses.R