When data science projects get beyond a few hundred lines of code they can become hard to modify without breaking the whole thing. Visualising and understanding the pipeline is key and the #rstats package {targets} is brilliant for this, it can even be used as an orchestrator for Python code!

Good to see my Leeds Institute for Transport Studies colleague Harry Roberts presenting on a detailed assessment of different routing tools. Headline: #opensource options are viable for research!

I very much enjoyed listening to a talk on landscape ecology by Sandra Denman at the #Herefordshire Parklands Conference, complete with reproducible geographic data visualisations made with the #rstats package {ggplot2}. Science and open source software in action!

Good to be back in Herefordshire. I'm here to visit family and to discuss my dad's archive of photos, maps and more. Will be talking with people here to learn more about landscape history and ecology, and to ensure the archive is as useful as possible to in Herefordshire and beyond.

Good to see open source and reproducible research mentioned prominently in Alain Chiaradia's talk at the Meeting Active Travel seminar in Cambridge this morning. sDNA+ is powerful and performant. Worth checking it out! Also interested to learn of any ongoing use cases for sDNA 🏗️

I've just updated the Reproducible project template repo based on a few small #reproducible research websites I've needed to create. This workflow is now my default for doing talks and workshops, quicker than PowerPoint with many benefits! Details: robinlovelace.net/reproducible...

On my way to the Modelling Active Travel seminar, after catching 05:18 train from Leeds. Cambridge here we come! This photo shows why accurate modelling of walking, wheeling and cycling requires high resolution data ⚡ For more on my upcoming talk and links see here: robinlovelace.net/events/aum20...

I finally got round to updating my website! Following in the footsteps of reproducible research pioneers, I've gone for Quarto, a flexible framework for scientific writing and publication, with support for citations and embedded code that actually runs 🎉 robinlovelace.net/posts/2026-0...

Migration to Quarto – Robin Lovelace

A practical migration and deployment update

robinlovelace.net

Looking forward to presenting on building communities and capacities in data-driven transport planning at the ITF Conference on Transport Data later today! For anyone interested in the topic but unable to make it in person or on Zoom, see #openaccess slides here: robinlovelace.net/itfworkshop/

Refugee flows out of Ukraine each year since 2022. Source: UNHCR. Reproducible #datascience source code to reproduce this map: github.com/Robinlovelac... Looking forward to presenting this later today!

Thinking about capacity and community-building in transport planning, it strikes me that maybe we should start thinking more about causes of friction and fragmentation. Disjoints between different government layers and departments in UK are a case in point!

An emphasis of our workshop at #MobileTartu was more reproducible, open and therefore scientific research. As part of this, students were asked to their work as code in the workshop repo. I'm happy to say they aced it! For many this was their first time using GitHub. Well done all 👏

The user interface in the new Posit Assistant is one of the best and most intuitive I've seen for using AI tools for editing code. This will be excellent for students and researchers already familiar with RStudio. This is a brilliant harness and user experience for using AI for data science 🎉

Andres Sevstuk presenting at #MobileTartu on his work modelling change in pedestrian traffic given changes to the network. This is very impressive and could help planners in many cities make their cities better for active travel. Looking forward to giving these methods a spin in Leeds and beyond!

I've just tried Posit Assistant on the free plan and must say, I'm impressed. Using the super-cheap Gemma 4 26B model (10% cost of Sonnet) on free plan it worked instantly. Hats of to the #posit team for integrating this into RStudio and allowing people to test with free plan!

Great to be in #Estonia again! I'm here for the #MobileTartu conference and will be teaching Data Science for Transport Planning. For anyone unable to make it in person but interested in the topic, you can follow the #openaccess materials here: tdscience.github.io/tartu26/ #reproducible #datascience

I want to share sad news of the passing of my father David Lovelace last month. He was an amazing dad, an inspiration for me and others around him, and made a huge contribution to landscape history, mapping and nature conservation where I grew up.

The #FOSS4G UK conference website is live and ready for you to buy tickets and submit talks. It's a very friendly and informative conference, highly recommended for anyone interested in this space. For details, see uk.osgeo.org/foss4guk2026/

Looking forward to this. If you're in/around Belfast on 18th May and interested in #datascience, transport planning, or evidence-based decision making check it out! Details TBC.

The logo for FOSS4G UK 2025 was awesome. Now we're looking to make the logo for FOSS4G UK 2026 and plans are for a logo competition. Watch this space any geo people with an interest in design, chance for eternal fame and good vibes incoming 🚀

FOSS4G UK was hosted here in #Leeds last year and it was a blast. So good it's happening here again in 2026! It will be 11th-12th October this year, watch this space for calls for abstracts etc, looking forward to it! #foss4g #geocomputation #GIS

I've tried many workflow automation tools and nothing beats the #rstats package {targets}. It's pure R, simple (while being feature-rich, great support for parallel execution and multi-lingual workflows, this is calling Python+DuckDB). It *trounces* the likes of make/dagster 4me. Check it out!

Calling all #RStats + #Transport researchers! stats19 v4.0.0 is here - a major update to the UK's road crash data package. Blog post: www.robinlovelace.net/post/stats19... Issues: github.com/ropensci/sta...

stats19 v4.0.0: 45 Years of UK Road Crash Data, Unified | Robin Lovelace

stats19 v4.0.0 unifies column names across 45 years of data, eliminates parsing warnings, fixes a coordinate precision bug in 2024 data, and adds vehicle data cleaning and collision cost estimation…

robinlovelace.net

I'll be hosting Will Deakin from Network Rail for a Seminar at the Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, and online, next week Thursday 19th March. Well worth listening to, so check out the invite and spread the word, all welcome: itsleeds.github.io/tds/sem2/inv...

Good to see conversations emerging from the recent Podcast interview I did. What a way to get research out there and to get conversations going 🎙️ I definitely recommend long-form conversations to supplement papers, reports, great to see ideas are reaching new people and places online 🚀

Exciting new funded #PhD opportunity here at the University of Leeds' Institute for Transport Studies #ITS. The project will develop definitive new insights into the impacts of new speed limit policies, down to the road network with the potential to save dozens of lives. Check it out!

I recently appeared on the Mobility Club podcast to discuss open data, open source tools for transport planning, and why data-driven decision making matters for active travel. 🎧 Great to chat with Isabella & Santiago about bridging research & practice!

My work recently set-up GitHub enterprise 🎉 It's probably overkill for many research use-cases but handy for teaching. Many thanks to the University of Leeds!

Today I learned 1) that the tram system of Leeds of early 1900s was HUGE and 2) that the 1910 town map of Leeds captured things that are TINY, including individual trees and rail tracks 🤯 Defo doing more with this soon, watch this space...

This paper was more than 2 years in the making, involving 3 organisations (Leeds Uni, Network Rail, ESRI), 2 (totally different) GISRUK presentations, dozens of iterations, 1 Python package (install it with pip install parenx), and amazing #opensource collaborations 🎉 Celebrating its launch today 🚀