Travel to Work Patterns in Scotland

I've recently been working with local level travel to work data for England and Wales from the 2011 Census and have produced a few maps of this. The same level of data are not yet available for Scotland but looking back through my data archives I discovered (to my horror) that I had not mapped Scottish commuting patterns for 2001 in any kind of detail. So, I plugged in QGIS, got the Data Zone travel to work data in the right format and produced a few maps. All this is of course in preparation for when the 2011 data becomes available and I can then compare how commuting patterns have changed. For now, though, I just wanted to share these maps, which I think do a good job of identifying the spatial structure of commuting as it was in 2001. I don't know if it will have changed much but it will be interesting to find out in due course. Click any of the maps to enlarge.

A general overview - bigger map

A smaller zoomed-in version showing Central Scotland

Selected cities - bigger map

Travel to work data for Scotland also includes travel to place of school or study so I just stripped those bits out and mapped travel to work flows. The other technical detail is that in 2001 many of the smaller flows were subject to a disclosure control process where flows with a value of 0, 1, 2 and 3 were changed in order to preserve confidentiality. But I'm not really worried about that for now as these maps are just intended to convey the broad patterns and I think they do that quite well.

Population Density in Scotland

Following on from the theme of the previous post, this post is all about population density. To cut a long story short, I took 1km grid cell data from the EU, joined it to population data for 2011 and did a little bit of 3D mapping - partly as an experiment with a dataset I'll use in our new MSc in Applied GIS and partly to see what spatial patterns it reveals. Entirely expected results, but the maps are quite striking. I've added some basic labels and a little bit of text to the first image. The second image focuses more closely on the North and East of Scotland and the final one is a close up of central Scotland. Click on the links below these smaller versions to see gigantic versions. Clicking on the thumbnails below will take you to a full screen size version.

Scotland - full size version

North and East Scotland - full size version

Central Scotland - full size version

What else can we say about population density in Scotland? Well, the average population density across Scotland in 2011 was just over 67 people per square kilometre (411 in England, 6,500 in Hong Kong, 1,000 in Bangladesh and 407 in the Netherlands). However, this is an example of when an 'average' figure is pretty misleading because most of Scotland's people are crammed in to the Central Belt - more than two thirds of the total. As you can see from the second image above, the rest are concentrated in the towns and cities of the North and East of Scotland. The obvious point here is that on the face of it Scotland doesn't appear to be very densely populated but the experience for most Scots is one of living in a densely populated country - at least on a day to day basis. For example, Glasgow's population density is over 3,000 people per square kilometre. 

The other thing to say is that the data is perhaps not 100% accurate. Some areas which are dark on the maps and apparently have zero population might in reality be populated, but this is the exception. If you're interested in finding out more about the data, take a look at the original source on the EU's data portal.