The West Midlands Accessibility and Travel Passes datasets are based around the boarding and travel associated to smartcards in the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) and linked to the English National Concessionary Travel Scheme (ENCTS). All datasets are anonymised and contain information on the Lower Super Output Area level (LSOA).

Content

The 9 datasets are available for download below and contain the following information:

• Accessibility estimates on Saturdays and Tuesdays to selected POIs (retail centres, supermarkets, clinics, GPs, hospitals, railway stations) based on bus timetables and the ITN road network at OA level 2010-2016.

• Historic and forecast count of individuals in each LSOA eligible for ENCTS concessionary travel passes in the West Midlands. 

• Frequency of boardings per month by ENCTS pass holders (age 60+ and disabled) in the West Midlands between 2010 and 2016.

• Imputed and actual monthly origin-destination flows of ENCTS passengers between LSOAs between January 2014 and August 2016. 

• Proportion of eligible ENCTS registered population in each LSOA assigned to each of six travel behaviour clusters.

Quality, Representation and Bias

The data only covers public transport usage in the West Midlands by smartcard users, and so has a significant demographic bias. Smartcard users did not account for many journeys in that time - concessionary travel is overweighted in the data because such users generally required smartcards at the time, unlike commercial users. The data is supplied by the official transport authority for the area and so is of high quality.

The flow counts do not represent all journeys and are limited to a specific service provider.