The Department for Transport (DfT) commissioned Peter Davidson Consultancy to undertake the analysis and produce software to build journey to work trip matrices from a compendium of data sources including the 1991 ONS National Census and the National Travel Survey. The matrices were to use a consistent definition of a trip, as applied in transport planning. The software has recently been updated to use data from the 2001 ONS National Census, which is much more detailed and covers the whole of the working population.
The 2001 CMT software is a useful reference for data about the number of trips to work from each home census output area in England, Scotland and Wales to every workplace output area in England, Scotland and Wales. (This is a much finer level of detail than the 1991 version, which only went down to ward level). Census output areas can be aggregated to Wards, Districts, Counties or Regions or can be grouped according to any user-defined zone combination. The output is a set of trip matrices representing any year between 2001 and 2003 which can be printed, tabulated in a report, manipulated, put into a spreadsheet, transport database or model.
Trip matrices can be annual averages or for a neutral month. They can be for a neutral weekday, average weekday, Saturday or Sunday. They can be split by mode (e.g. car driver, car passenger, bus, train, tube, walk, cycle, motorcycle) or by mode chain, which takes access modes into consideration, and by car availability. Trip matrices can be Home-to-Work or Work-to-Home. They are provided with their variance (index of dispersion) matrix so that they can be statistically merged with other trip matrices according to the DfT matrix merging methodology.
The new 2001 release of The Census Matrix Tools Software is a major new source of information. It is an essential reference which every transport organisation should have. It is set to become an essential element of any transport planning project, and a standard reference for preparing LTP£s and monitoring for best value. CMT software and matrices have already been supplied to DfT, SRA, TRL, many of the multi-modal studies, consultants, Local Authorities and others. It is available for PCs running Windows 2000 and above and is licensed priced £500+VAT on CD (please download our software order form, complete, sign and send it to us) or £450+VAT via our website, where you can also build a free 5-zone matrix from 2001 Census Matrix Tools.
A full article on the 2001 Census Matrix Tools Software is in the February 2006 issue of TEC magazine (Vol 47, No 2).
For further information e-mail censusmatrixtools@peter-davidson.com.