The location of new housing developments, and the provision of safe space for walking and cycling to key destinations around them, have major and long lasting impacts on travel behaviour, health, and environmental outcomes. Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is a well-recognised concept in urban planning, but systematic evidence is often lacking on the likely ‘active travel performance’ of new developments, making it hard for the planning process to support sustainable transport objectives. This paper articulates the concept of ‘Active Travel Oriented Development’ (ATOD) and describes methods for operationalising it. We demonstrate the use of a set of simple metrics to assess the active travel performance of new and proposed development sites. ATOD has the benefits of building on the established concept of TOD and being easy to assess. We conclude that ATOD, and tools for measuring it, are needed to ensure that transport and development policies work in harmony.

Talbot, J., Lucas-Smith, M., Speakman, A., Streb, M., Nuttall, S., Carlino, D., Johansson, P., Sheehan, N., Groot, N., & Lovelace, R. (2022). Active Travel Oriented Development: Assessing the suitability of sites for new homes. European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, 22(4), 51–72. https://doi.org/10.18757/ejtir.2022.22.4.6015

We analyse ongoing efforts to share genomic data about SARS-COV-2 through a comparison of the characteristics of the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data and European Nucleotide Archive infrastructures with respect to the representativeness and governance of the research data therein. We focus on data and metadata on genetic sequences posted on the two infrastructures in the period between March 2020 and October 2022, thus capturing a period of acute response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a variety of data science methods, we compare the extent to which the two portals succeeded in attracting data submissions from different countries around the globe and look at the ways in which submission rates varied over time. We go on to analyse the structure and underlying architecture of the infrastructures, reviewing how they organise data access and use, the types of metadata and version tracking they provide. Finally, we explore usage patterns of each infrastructure based on publications that mention the data to understand how data reuse can facilitate forms of diversity between institutions, cities, countries, and funding groups. Our findings reveal disparities in representation between the two infrastructures and differing practices in data governance and architecture. We conclude that both infrastructures offer useful lessons, with GISAID demonstrating the importance of expanding data submissions and representation, while the COVID-19 data portal offers insights into how to enhance data usability.

Sheehan, N., Leonelli, S., Botta, F., 2023: From Collection To Analysis: A Comparison of GISAID and The Covid-19 Data Portal (in review @ codata data science journal)