Operators of registered local bus services in England (outside London) are to be required to make details of their services available as open data, as required by the Bus Services Act 2017. The scope of open data encompasses timetable data, fares data, vehicle location (real time) data and historic performance (punctuality) data.
The open data requirements are phased, with the first set of requirements - to publish timetable data - coming into effect from 31 December 2020.
This will be followed by:
location and simple fares by 07 January 2021
punctuality data for the preceding calendar year (August to December 2020) to be provided by 31 March 2021
complex fares data by 7 January 2023
This guidance has been updated to include details on publishing location and simple fares, and on the new Analyse Bus Open Data Service, which will support operators in providing punctuality data.
The Department for Transport (DfT) is helping operators meet the statutory requirement through the provision of the Bus Open Data Service (BODS). It’s a new digital service which provides access for third-party data consumers to a distributed model of bus open data, where the data is, largely, held by the operators who run the services.
BODS was launched in January 2020. The timetable service was made publicly available at the same time, allowing operators to become ‘early adopters’ of the service and start publishing their data ahead of the statutory deadline. We’ve been helping operators to learn how to use the new digital service and the data creation tools provided with it. We now have 340 operators registered onto BODS [footnote 1]. And, we’ve had 109 operators publishing their timetables data, including 4 of the ‘Big 5’ bus operators.
In October 2020, we added the location data service to BODS and now have 79 operators publishing approximately 10,000 vehicle location feeds (out of 32,500 vehicles). The BODS fares data service was also made publicly available in November 2020. We now have 14 operators publishing 160 datasets.
DfT will continue to offer business change support to bus operators during the transitional period, which is scheduled to run until December 2021. We’d encourage operators to continue to engage with the Bus Open Data team and take advantage of this opportunity.
