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.
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| A smaller zoomed-in version showing Central Scotland |
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.
