A free tool has been developed to sketch out a bus, tram or metro route across a city to determine whether it’s worth building.
The brainchild of AI and data science graduate Aleksejs Belasovs, TransportForge helps to see early on if a proposed route is viable and its likely impacts.
Professional transport planning software is expensive and designed for specialists and not easily accessible for community groups, counsellors and transport campaigners.
So far Norwich, Edinburgh, Cambridge, York and Leeds have been added, with London part of future plans.
Belasovs said: “The aim isn’t to replace the sophisticated modelling undertaken by transport consultancies, and I wouldn’t claim it is more accurate than those professional tools.
“Instead, it is intended to make the early stages of transport planning far more accessible by allowing people to rapidly design ideas, visualise them, test journey times and estimate potential impacts within a single, easy-to-use platform.
“My hope is that it helps shape those important initial conversations around local transport investment.”
The data analytics platform has been built using agentic AI coding tools. The methodology broadly follows the structure of the Department for Transport’s Transport Analysis Guidance (TAG).
Demand is estimated using journeys between census-derived population locations. Those journeys are evaluated against real public transport timetables, with costs calculated using established TAG principles.
