Assessment of vehicle use is often based on looking at average mileages, and how those vary. However, it is argued that transport policies, or other factors, may impact relatively subtly on different groups within populations, in ways which might be difficult to detect by looking at differences in, or changes to, averages. This paper reports on unique opportunities arising from a research project that is fusing and analysing several UK Government data sources together for new purposes — specifically, data collected for vehicle licensing and from regular vehicle inspections. In particular, the resultant dataset provides a unique opportunity to look at the distribution of mileages travelled by vehicles registered in different areas, and to understand how and why those distributions may differ, and which characteristics of those distributions may be most insightful for identifying and understanding the variation. This paper describes the analysis undertaken at a range of spatial scales and the calculation of a range of statistics to describe the vehicle distributions, and assessing the extent to which they differ, and what that might imply. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting