Rail travel in the city of Liverpool

To illustrate the rail infrastructure in the city of Liverpool, I used data downloaded from the QuickOSM plugin for QGIS.  Detailed in the attribute table was information on the type of rail line, such as active or disused, but I have isolated the Merseyrail network based on previous knowledge. The OpenStreetMap base layer was set to around 40% transparency.   

The statistics used in the choropleth map below were sourced from the method of travel to work dataset published by Nomis in the 2011 national census.  The proportion of residents using the rail network to commute to work was calculated and selected when joining the XLS file.  The map clearly shows that residents living in a ward which hosts a Merseyrail station are the most likely to use this method of travel and that the railway is enabling mobility across Liverpool, particularly in the south of the city. 

Thinking about how the rail network influences distance travelled to work, I have generated a chart that plots the number of residents commuting by train against the average distance travelled to work by residents, for each ward in Liverpool.  Using Datawrapper, the chart shows the wards with a Merseyrail station to the right and the wards without a Merseyrail station to the left, and it includes various medians too.

Using ArcGIS Pro, I've included a second variable into the project to generate a bivariate choropleth map. There are four colours on display here, and they describe the relationship between the number of individuals commuting to work and the number of unemployed individuals for each ward using a "high-low" metric rather than distinctive numerics.

Building on this bivariate choropleth map, the representation below describes a finer scale shown at the Lower Super Output Area boundary.  This map includes the number of individuals commuting by train and the number of employed residents for each LSOA in Liverpool and it follows the same "high-low" metric as the previous map.  

Through RStudio, the data displayed in the bivariate choropleth above was used in a linear regression analysis.  This plots the residents commuting by train as the independent variable to measure its effect on the dependent variable which was the economically active residents.  

Accessibility to the nearest train station was mapped and is shown below.  This map features three buffer rings around each rail station situated at 400-metres apart which represents a five-, ten- and fifteen-minute walking distance.  This was achieved by performing a buffer function on the active stations point data in ArcGIS.  I chose to keep the base layer white to highlight the colours of the buffer rings.

The final representation builds on the first map in this chapter.  It differs in that it shows potential opportunities for future rail developments in Liverpool.  A weakness in current rail services is that the Merseyrail network, and also the few Northern services in Liverpool, only operate journeys to and from the city centre.  Whilst this is often described as the centripetal force of urban rail, it suggests that there is an inequality in this form of transport as it mostly serves an area of high economic performance in Liverpool; residents living in wards and neighbourhoods located on the periphery of the city, such as Croxteth, Yew Tree and Woolton, have poor access to the rail network.  By engaging the disused rail infrastructure throughout the city, it is possible to create a number of 'loop lines' and increase accessibility to the rail network throughout Liverpool.  

Building on these planning opportunities would open up a much larger area of the city to the rail system.  As shown in the map below, transforming the currently disused rail stations into active stations would allow around eight wards to access the network within fifteen minutes or less.