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English Workplaces

Help the English get to work!

This POI mod provides workplaces to generate demand for workers traveling to offices. This covers England on building data from OSM. This mod adds about 27 million pax to the map and I recommend reducing your typical demand level by half to account for the increased population. This mod also requires my workplace demand curve which will ensure the additional pax come from plausible commuting distances.


The calculations in this mod are somewhat arbitrary and rely OpenStreetMap data. I use the following data sources to create this mod:

OSM data pulled using Overpass-turbo.eu for buildings tagged Office/Commercial/Industrial/Hospital/Government.

Offices for National Statistics: Output Areas (December 2021) Boundaries EW BGC (V2)(https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/4d4e021d-fe98-4a0e-88e2-3ead84538537/output-areas-december-2021-boundaries-ew-bgc-v21)

Using the OSM data, I can estimate the floor space of these buildings using recorded floors/height (Recorded levels if available, then height/4m, and default to 1) and building footprint. Next, I assume one worker per ~15m squared of office space, ~20m squared hospital/government/public space, ~30m squared retail/commercial space, or ~100m squared of industrial/warehouse space. This generates about 7.2 million workers across~10k output areas after blocks with less than 110 workers dropped. I then multiply worker counts by 4 to approximate the English labor force and overweight concentrated job areas that tend to generate mass transit trips.

I hand reviewed the POI and removed a few instances of junk data that generated massive workplaces in rural areas and were likely due to data errors. The remaining sites were left unchanged and broadly make sense with the largest POIs in central or industrial areas of major city's central business districts. They are not perfect and some do appear offshore near the locations in question. General limitations come from the fact that many buildings lack a level count/height and may be skinnier than their ground footprint.

Please contact me here or on the NIMBYRails discords with comments, feedback, and suggestions.