CRUSE is an open data project but not all of the input or output datasets can be available due to confidentiality considerations and the law. Datasets were provided by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) and others to support the project and these have been processed securely. Where appropriate, aggregated outputs derived from the input datasets have been made available at different geographic levels, as outlined below.

We provide the datasets in the industry standard GeoPackage file format.

Software for reading in and analysing GeoPackage files

We provide the outputs as GeoPackage files (with the extension .gpkg). This is an open standard that has high performance and relatively small file sizes. Most modern software packages for data science and geographic data analysis can be used to read-in and work with these GeoPackage files.

We recommend QGIS, a mature and high performance Geographic Information System (GIS) for reading-in and analysing these files. QGIS has the advantages of being free to install and use, having a strong user community who provide tutorials and support, and a strong developer community that maintains Long Term Support versions (Version 3.22.9 LTR was the latest release as of August 2022) that are stable and future proof. See the QGIS website for instructions on installing and using QGIS.

For more advanced users we recommend reading-in and analysing CRUSE datasets with R or Python to enable reproducible code that can be extended. The codebase underlying the CRUSE project was written in R, a language that has strong support for geographic data analysis.

If you have any questions about the datasets provided by the project or how to make the most out of them, please get in touch on our user forum (TBC).

Route network data

The most useful output of the CRUSE project for many people involved in designed cycle networks and associated interventions will be aggregated route network datasets, provided at the segment level, using travel flow aggregation methods developed at the University of Leeds (Morgan and Lovelace 2020).

The following datasets are provided at the route network level:

University of Leeds Logo AECOM Logo Transport Infrastructure Ireland Logo

References

Morgan, Malcolm, and Robin Lovelace. 2020. “Travel Flow Aggregation: Nationally Scalable Methods for Interactive and Online Visualisation of Transport Behaviour at the Road Network Level.” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 48 (6): 1684–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808320942779.