Transport: key data sources

Transport Scotland are the national transport agency for Scotland, tasked with delivering the Scottish Government's vision for transport. They are the main provider of transport and travel statistics relating to Scotland. Transport Scotland publish a range of statistical publications about travel and transport in Scotland. For an overview see Transport Scotland - Statistics.

• Scottish Transport Statistics is published annually and provides detailed data on motor vehicle registrations and road traffic, infrastructure, bus and rail passenger journeys, air and ferry passengers, international comparisons and environmental impacts. There are downloadable excel files with detailed tables for each chapter containing breakdowns by personal characteristics and geographies. The most recent report, published in 2024, provides data up to 2022-23 - see Scottish Transport Statistics 2023.
• Transport and Travel in Scotland is published annually and presents transport and travel findings from the Scottish Household Survey. This is an annual interview-led survey of the general population using a random sample of people in private residences. The survey covers a range of topics, a number of which relate to transport and travel, and includes a travel diary in which respondents report on the details of all the journeys they made the day before their survey interview. During 2020 and 2021 a telephone survey replaced face-to-face interviews so data from these years are not directly comparable with other years. The most recent Transport and Travel in Scotland report was published in November 2024 and presents data for 2023. The reports include downloadable excel tables with survey results broken down by personal characteristics and geographies.
• Key Reported Road Casualties Scotland and Reported Road Casualties Scotland are annual publications, with the former published first, containing provisional statistics for the previous year, and the latter following later in the year with the finalised statistics. Figures may change as a result of late returns and amendments to the data, although these changes are likely to be small. The statistics in these two reports are based on Police Scotland information on road collisions where someone has been injured or killed. Collisions with no injuries and collisions not reported to the police are not included in these figures. The latest Reported Road Casualties Scotland report was published on 30 October 2024 and contains finalised data up to 2023.
• The Disability and Transport publications provide analysis of transport data for disabled people, with the data taken mainly from the Scottish Household Survey. The most recent publication also includes data for the outcome indicators of the Accessible Travel Framework, with additional data sources including the Bus Passenger Survey and National Rail Passenger Survey. So far two editions of this report have been published, the most recent being Disability and Transport 2021, which followed the earlier publication Disability and Transport 2019. The reports include accompanying Excel spreadsheets containing the full analysis summarised in the reports. 

The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) is a relative measure of deprivation across 6,976 small areas called datazones. SIMD looks at the extent to which an area is deprived across seven domains: income, employment, education, health, access to services, crime and housing. It is the Scottish Government's standard approach to identify areas of multiple deprivation in Scotland. The SIMD ‘access to services’ domain provides a composite index of geographic access deprivation and includes indicators for drive time and public transport travel times to selected services, and superfast broadband access. A SIMD datazone lookup file ranks datazones for SIMD overall and for each of the SIMD domains, including the ‘access to services’ domain.