Plan Your Active Travel Schemes

Try the alpha at plan.activetravelengland.gov.uk

Code: github.com/acteng/atip, github.com/acteng/atip-data-prep, github.com/acteng/scheme-sketcher-lib

About

While Dustin was on secondment with Active Travel England (ATE) from 2023 to 2025, he led development of PYATS.

Sketching schemes

Active Travel England is a central government agency, and needs to review proposed schemes from authorities across the country. Authorities vary in their technical GIS expertise, and have previously received the geographic location of schemes in a variety of incompatible GIS formats, PDF maps, and plaintext descriptions, making standardised and automated analysis nearly impossible. Dustin developed PYATS to let authorities with any level of GIS experience quickly draw schemes in their browser.

The project included a tool to trace routes snapped to existing roads, and neighbourhood areas bounded by roads. The route snapper tool developed for this is the first known open source approach for doing this completely client-side, without a backend routing API. This simplified cloud deployment, requiring only to host static files, and keeps the latency while drawing absolutely minimal.

This sketch tool has been used by a variety of users to collect over 17,000 miles of routes, enabling analysis of funded schemes.

Browsing schemes with contextual layers

Active Travel England's Inspectorate team reviews proposed schemes, finds problems, and teaches guidance to local authorities to improve the designs. To do their daily work, they need to consult dozens of different data sources for road noise, pollution, census, traffic, collision statistics, and so on. Since it's so tedious to switch between many tools and to relate them to sketched schemes, Dustin developed the second part of PYATS, bringing together all these layers in one place. This streamlines different review processes, seeing submitted schemes alongside contextual layers. The specialised UI is much faster for the specific Inspectorate tasks than off-the-shelf solutions like ArcGIS.

This tool pulls together dozens of public and (internal only) private data sources specific to England. The tool makes extensive use of PMTiles, a cloud-friendly vector tile format, to simplify hosting.

Working with the stakeholder

Dustin worked directly with the users of PYATS (the Inspectorate and external users responsible for sketching schemes). Regular feedback and shared co-design sessions let the tool be perfectly fit-to-task. Dustin worked with other members of ATE's data and digital team to develop and launch the tool, and Jadene Aderonmu from Methods, who led user experience research and design.