To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what comparative assessment he has made of the adequacy of (a) access to and (b) use of open data for real time bus times in (i) London and (ii) the North East; what steps he is taking to incentivise third party developers to produce aggregated real time transport apps for Newcastle and the North East; and whether he has had discussions with representatives of the Open Data Institute on the steps that would contribute best to promoting third party developers.
Answered on
27 January 2022
Since 2007, TfL has made data freely available to enable app developers to create journey planning solutions for passengers, so that bus time arrival information is readily available. Since the launch of the London Datastore, there are now over 600 apps powered by this data and almost half of all national bus journeys completed in London.
Inspired by the success in London, the Bus Open Data Service (BODS) was launched in 2020 to make bus live location data available to application developers for local bus services across England. The National Bus Strategy includes a commitment to provide funding for predictions information which will inform the passenger how many minutes away their bus is from the bus stop and on average how long the journey will take.
In the North East, application developers such as Bus Times and Citymapper have been able to launch their journey planning products which include bus time arrivals utilising data from the Bus Open Data Service and integrate it into multimodal journey plans to enable passengers to plan their journeys on public transport.
The Open Data Institute have shaped the programme since its early inception back in 2017, for example delivering the Discovery research project. We will continue to build upon this success of the early programme, steered by our programme board which the Open Data Institute does participate in.