High-Resolution Transport Poverty Risk Index (TPRI) for European Rural Areas

This submission includes a comprehensive dataset and code package for the development and application of the Transport Poverty Risk Index (TPRI), a high-resolution, spatially detailed, and timely measure of transport poverty risk in Europe’s rural areas. The TPRI framework is based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s risk concept, adapted to capture external transport costs (fuel and electricity prices), exposure to private motorized mobility, availability of public transport alternatives, fleet composition, travel-time accessibility to urban centers, socioeconomic conditions, and demographic factors.

The input dataset includes:

1. Web-scraped and API-based data on fuel and electricity prices from various sources such as Eurostat, GISCO, ENTSO-E, Weekly Oil Bulletin, RIATE, and accessibility datasets.
2. Official territorial statistics (Eurostat) to capture the Exposure dimension (dependence on private motorized mobility, fleet composition, travel time, and access to urban centers).
3. Socioeconomic and demographic indicators from various sources (income, poverty risk, long-term unemployment, age dependency, lone-parent households, foreign-born population shares) to represent the Vulnerability dimension.

The code package comprises:

1. Data preprocessing scripts for cleaning, imputation of missing values, outlier treatment, transformation, standardisation, and construction of a normalised transport fuel cost indicator (expressed in euro per kilometre).
2. Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis to reduce redundancy among correlated indicators and ensure the composite score reflects statistically distinct sources of variation.
3. Geometric mean aggregation for combining multiple indicators into a single TPRI score at grid-cell level where data availability allows.
4. Analyses, visualizations, and mapping tools demonstrating spatial differences in transport poverty risk across European territories using case studies from selected Dutch regions, Ourense (Spain), Pays Pyrénées (France), Val di Cecina (Italy), West Pomeranian (Poland), Upper Norrland and adjacent northern Swedish regions.
5. Validation against observed mobility and affordability outcomes to better understand the relationship between the TPRI and realised deprivation, as well as potential coping mechanisms in high-risk areas.

The primary objective of this dataset is to support rural actors and policymakers by providing a novel data source that enables them to:

1. Identify territories with concentrated transport poverty risk.
2. Understand which dimensions (cost shocks, exposure, transport alternatives, demographic factors) contribute most to the risk explanation in specific areas.
3. Develop targeted public action and policy responses based on local contexts and realities of rural, peripheral, and sparsely populated territories across Europe.