Data Science Resources

2021-05-22 · Dave

Comparing Australia - Round 1

This is the first round of (what I hope will become) a series where I put each capital city region in Australia up against each other, in a contest to determine once and for all which is best!

Round 1 - Distance to Public Transport

In this round I will compare each city according to how close 95% of the population are to public transport.

The Data

  1. The people come from our Twin Cities (which has the whole population of Australia at a household level).
  2. Public Transport locations are sourced from GTFS

The Rules

  1. Distance is measured in metres (using the Haversine formula)
  2. I have not specified or constrained this to any mode of transport
  3. This does not account for frequency of service, or connectivity of routes, or anything meaningful (that actually sounds like an interesting project. Anyone want to commission this?)
  4. The capital city regions are defined as per the ABS Greater Capital City Areas
  5. No extra effort has been made to get public transport locations from other data sources, so if it’s not in GTFS, it’s not in.

The Results

In a surprising turn of events, Sydney wins with 95% of its population within 412m of a public transport stop, closely followed by the Australian Capital Territory.

Darwin and Brisbane fare the worst languishing in the last two positions in this contest.

Greater capital city Distance (95th percentile)
Greater Sydney 412.07
Australian Capital Territory 443.47
Greater Perth 628.75
Greater Adelaide 705.60
Greater Melbourne 781.94
Greater Hobart 1925.65
Greater Brisbane 2316.38
Greater Darwin 3091.40

And this wouldn’t be one of my blogs without a map, so here are all the households outside the 95th percentile in each respective city region.

What’s next?

What do you think should be the next round? I’m thinking something like

  • proximity to parkland
  • number of people living on ‘main roads’ (above a certain speed limit)
  • distance to school (for children)

Let me know if the comments which one I should chose, or if you have any of your own suggestions.