Rail journey cost calculator for Great Britain

Abstract: Accessibility of different places, such as hospitals or areas with jobs, is important in understanding transportation systems, urban environments, and potential inequalities in what services and opportunities different people can reach. Often, research in this area is framed around the question of whether people living in an area are able to reach certain destinations within a prespecified time frame. However, the cost of such journeys, and whether they are affordable, is often omitted or not considered to the same level. Here, we present a Python package and an associated data set which allows to analyse the cost of train journeys in Great Britain. We present the original data set we used to construct this, the Python package we developed to analyse it, and the output data set which we generated. We envisage our work to allow researchers, policy makers, and other stakeholders, to investigate questions around the cost of train journeys, any geographical or social inequalities arising from this, and how the transport system could be improved.