Podaris:Insight Bus Connectivity Assessment (BCA) Toolkit

The BCA Toolkit calculates the five quantitative metrics English Local Transport Authorities are required to assess and report on in their annual Bus Connectivity Assessments

What is Podaris:Insight?

Podaris:Insight is a toolkit for simplifying a number of types of accessibility analysis. It is designed to dramatically speed up the process of performing accessibility analysis on networks and datasets created or imported in Podaris. It provides a simple interface through which analysis projects can be created and shared, and the corresponding results exported. You can learn more about Podaris:Insight and the analysis types that it offers here.

What are Bus Connectivity Assessments (BCAs)?

Bus Connectivity Assessments were introduced by the Department for Transport in 2024 to complement the Bus Service Improvement Plans (BSIPs) all English Local Transport Authorities are required to submit.

A Bus Connectivity Assessment (BCA) is an annual process where Local Transport Authorities (LTAs) identify the best bus network to meet connectivity objectives with varying levels of public funding. LTAs, in collaboration with bus operators, report on connectivity, patronage, types of service, innovation, and funding. This provides evidence for, and feeds into the LTA's Local Transport Plan, as well as helping to inform future Government decisions on bus interventions.

If you want to find out more about BCAs you can read about them in the DFT's 2024 BSIP Guidance here, or check out this article in Local Transport Today all about BCAs and the BCA Toolkit.

What is the BCA Toolkit?

The Bus Connectivity Assessment (BCA) Toolkit enables you to generate, in a matter of minutes, the five quantitative metrics required in all English BCAs. The toolkit automatically fetches all the data required to perform these metric calculations and outputs the results in an interactive map format.

The BCA toolkit is not just for answering the DfT’s BCA metrics; the analysis types embedded within the BCA toolkit can be used for many other purposes. For example, it can be extended to account for the connectivity provided by Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) services, or to appraise post-franchising bus networks.

What are the five quantitative metrics, B1-B5, required for the Bus Connectivity Assessment?

• B1 - Catchment Analysis
  What percentage of the population can travel to one or more destinations within 30 minutes by bus?
• B2 - Peak Services
  How many high-frequency routes (defined by DfT guidance as those with >= 6 buses per hour) serve each destination during the peak period?
• B3 - Off-Peak Services
  During the off-peak period, how many services serve each destination?
• B4 - Journey Time Analysis
  What is the average journey time for each population group to each destination by bus during the peak period?
• B5 - Bus Stop Access
  For all the bus stops directly connected to the destinations, what is the percentage of the population within a 500m walk?

How to use the BCA Toolkit

Step by Step

1. A new BCA analysis can be created by selecting the BCA template option when creating a new Insight project.
   
   
2. Selecting this template option will open a new starter template.
   
    
   
   Within this starter template are a number of options to set: 
   1. Geography
      Selecting Local Transport Authority enables you to select the LTA you would like to analyse from a drop down menu of all LTAs in England. The geography can also be set to Custom, if you would like to use the toolkit for a different analysis region.
   2. Bus Network Source
      Here you can choose where to source the bus network used in the analysis. This can be set to:
      1. BODS - The Bus Open Data Service was launched by the Department for Transport in 2020 and provides bus timetable, vehicle location and fares data for every local bus service in England.
      2. TNDS - The Traveline National Dataset contains public transport timetables for bus, light rail, tram and ferry services in Great Britain. It does not include national rail or coach services.
      3. Custom - If you have your own Podaris project or network that you wish to use, this can be set as the network source using the custom setting. You might want to do this if you were assessing an existing rail or multi-modal public transport network using the BCA toolkit for example.
   3. Demography
      Set the underlying demographic data, used to quantify population accessibility in metrics B1, B4 and B5, as either 2021 Census Output Areas, 2021 Census Centroids, or set a Custom demography. You may choose to set a custom demography if, for example, you wanted to instead use pre-Covid census data.
   4. Demand Responsive Transport (DRT)
      Where Demand Responsive Transport schemes exist (or are planned) as part of the bus network this can be specified using the DRT Zones Dataset, to set the area in which the DRT scheme operates, and the DRT Wait Time, to set the average wait time of a passenger using the DRT service.
3. Connectivity to key destinations can be set in the Destinations starter template options.
   
   
   
   The destinations automatically included in the BCA toolkit are:
   
   1. Business: Business Parks and Industrial Areas
   2. Healthcare: Dentists; Hospitals; Pharmacies; GPs
   3. Work: Town Centres and Cities; Offices; Banks
   4. Education: Primary Schools; Secondary Schools; Further Education; Universities
   5. Retail: Shopping
   6. Leisure Opportunities: Restaurants; Cinemas; Play Spaces; Playing Fields; Parks
   7. Other Modes of Transport: Ports and Ferries; Airports; Bus Stations; Interchanges
   The BCA toolkit automatically fetches this destination data from sources such as Ordnance Survey, NHS England, and the Department for Education based on the destination types defined in the DfT's guidance. Where authoritative data sources are not available, it fetches point-of-interest data from OpenStreetMap.
   
   These destinations are customizable, should you wish to add in new destinations or edit the data sources used for existing destinations. This can be done by selecting the pencil icon next to the existing dataset you want to edit, or the add icon next to the destination type you want to add a new dataset to.
   
   
4. Finally, the Peak Period and Off-Peak Period are set to a default of:
   1. Peak Period - Tuesday 7-9am
   2. Off-Peak Period - Tuesday 10-12am
   These can be customized to fit your area's peak and off-peak periods, and to compare network connectivity across different days and time periods.
   
   

Interpreting Results

Each destination type has its own results page generated, with outputs for the five quantitative metrics (B1-B5) presented for each of the destination sub-types. For example, as in the image above, the ‘healthcare’ destination type contains results for each of the B1-B5 metrics broken down for each of its sub-destinations (dentists, hospitals, pharmacies, and GPs).

Results are produced in both a tabular format (which can be extracted into Google Sheets/Excel) and visually, as maps that can be downloaded as an image or taken into other GIS tools to style and analyse further.