Transport Direct
The Transport Direct Programme was a division of the UK Department for Transport to develop standards, data and better information technology systems to support public transport. It developed and operates the Transport Direct Portal which is a public facing multi-modal journey planner. It also supports the creation and management of comprehensive databases of all public transport movements in the United Kingdom with Traveline. During 2010 two key datasets were released as Open Data and published on www.data.gov.uk.
The closure of the portal was announced in September 2014, and the portal closed on 30 September 2014.
Transport Direct Portal
The journey planner was a public-facing multi-modal door-to-door journey planner website for Great Britain which provided options for both public transport and car-based options and included an option for cyclists in some parts of the country.Standards
A number of data standards were developed to support the collection, transfer and management of the required transport data:-- CycleNetXChange a UK data protocol for exchanging information about infrastructure to support the development of a national cycle journey planning function within the Transport Direct Portal.
- IFOPT, a CEN standard for defining public transport access information.
- JourneyWeb, a protocol to allow the development of a distributed journey planning service.
- NaPTAN for the exchange of information associated with bus stops, railway station and other public transport access point.
- NPTG for the exchange of information about places and points of interest.
- SIRI, a CEN standard for exchanging real-time public transport information.
- TransXChange, a UK data protocol for the exchange of public transport schedules in conjunction with Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, Arriva and Stagecoach Group
Data resources
The development of Transport Direct has created a number of comprehensive national datasets to support the Transport Direct Portal. The assessment of accessibility to services by public transport was made a requirement for the Local Transport Plans in 2004. Measuring the level of accessibility required the use of the data collected by Transport Direct.This data is being used by an increasing number of 3rd parties, including Google Transit and East Anglia / East Midlands Traveline Regions. MySociety's Mapumental accessibility product. During 2010 increasing amounts of data has become available as Open Data including NaPTAN and NPTDR.
National Public Transport Access Nodes database (NaPTAN)
The dataset is a UK nationwide system for uniquely identifying all the points of access to public transport in the UK. The dataset, which is open data contains details of some 360,000 nodes including every UK railway station, bus station, airport, ferry terminal, bus stop, taxi rank or other place where public transport can be joined; it also details all public entrances to transport hubs and can contain details of airport gates, railway platforms and ferry berths. Each element is allocated a unique 'NaPTAN identifier'. Each entry is linked with one or more localities in the National Public Transport Gazetteer.It is updated on data.gov.uk every three months.
The CEN standard integrates many concepts used in the NaPTAN standard into a European standard for stop identification as an extension to Transmodel which is the European standard for Public Transport information.
Elements of the NaPTAN are used in the timetable data provided by the Bus Open Data Service
National Public Transport Gazetteer
The is a dataset detailing some 50,000 place names for cities, town, villages, hamlets and suburbs in the UK. It is available as open data from data.gov.uk.National Public Transport Data Repository
The National Public Transport Data Repository is a snapshot of all public transport schedules for the UK including bus, tram, train, ferry coach and rail. A dataset is created each year for October and the most recent version is available as open data from data.gov.uk.It was originally created for use by local authorities and other organisations in the production of accessibility strategies, which was a requirement for Local Transport Plan. The data repository was first set up in 2004, and an annual snapshot of data has been created each year since then. Data is collected for all public transport services running in Great Britain during a full week in October each year. It is supplied by Traveline regions and the Association of Train Operating Companies and processed into files for each local authority, broken down further into files for each transport mode. The data in the repository is in both ATCO.CIF and TransXChange technical formats, rather than in a format that would be readily recognised as a timetable. NPTDR was made available as Open Data in September 2010, with new October 2010 data released in March 2011.
Datasets available:
- October 2004 dataset
- October 2005 dataset
- October 2006 dataset
- October 2007 dataset
- October 2008 dataset
- October 2009 dataset
National Coach Services Database
National Car Parks Database
The National Car Parks dataset contains details of every public car park in the country and also every Park and Ride site. This dataset is not available as open data.National public transport dataset
During 2009-10 Traveline has been developing a national dataset covering local transport details for all parts of the UK which will be updated every week. It has an associated data sharing agreement defining how it can be used by 3rd parties. The dataset current does not include rail or coach services.Cycle routes database
Transport Direct has been contracting companies to survey parts of the UK to provide information to support the cycle journey planning function of the Transport Direct Portal which has been developed in association with Cycling England.Open data considerations
All the transport schedules were initially closed data covered by Crown copyright.In March 2009 the Cabinet Office published the 'Power of Information Taskforce Report' which noted that although the National Public Transport Data Repository described itself as 'Crown Copyright' investigation showed that the database was not actually government data and also that there were significant changes for reuse of the NPTDR dataset. The report suggested that there should be a presumption in favour of information which has been created by public sector bodies being available for re-use. It is suggested that there should be a clear and consistent copyright and licensing rules applied making it easy to work with data from multiple sources in the public sector. It recommended the a 'Crown Commons' style approach with "highly permissive licensing scheme that is transparent, easy to understand and easy to use, modeled on the 'Click Use' license" should be developed.
In December 2009 Local Transport Today reported that 'Data release could spark transport IT innovations". The magazine reported that "Among the data to be made accessible through the site are trunk road traffic volumes, the National Public Transport Access Node database and the National Public Transport Data Repository ". A DfT spokeswoman was reported to say: "We will seek to embrace new technology to enable partners to provide exciting, user-focused services such as recently seen with satellite navigation and iPhone applications",
In March 2010 the Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that the NaPTAN dataset was to be immediately made available from the data.gov.uk site as Open Data, as well as confirming an impending release of Ordnance Survey data. In his speech he observed that at present public transport timetables and real-time running information was owned by the operating companies but that the government would work to free it up. He also said that "from today we will make it a condition of future franchises that this data will be made freely available".
NPTDR was made available as Open Data in September 2010.
Costs
The costs of operating Transport Direct and creating the associated portal are funded by central Government. The data used by the portal is created and maintained by a range of other organisations. Work commissioned by the Department in 2000 indicated that the services that Transport Direct seeks to deliver would not be provided by the private sector.The cost of the Transport Direct Programme from April 2003 to March 2006 was £45 million up for the period April 2003 to March 2006 until then £10 million for the period April 2006 to March 2007. The Portal itself cost £5.9 million for the period April 2006 to March 2007. The 10 millionth user session took place on 1 December 2006 with the number of session steadily growing over time; 1.126 million user sessions were recorded for August 2007.
A Freedom of Information request was made on 4 January 2006 that requested details of the cost of the development of the Transport Direct portal.
History
Context
in 1985 allowed operators to determine routes and frequencies which were normally prepared by hand and few transport authorities had databases giving the name and locations of bus stops, and where they did they were in a locally developer format. Bus operators were required register their schedules with VOSA which they did on paper at timing point level together with a prose description of the route. An additional problem was that a single bus stop could be served by multiple bus operators who would typically use different names for the same bus stop. The Bus wars in the early period of deregulation added to the confusion and printer timetables at bus stops largely disappeared as bus companies cut costs.In 1986 during the conservative government the M25 motorway was opened by Margaret Thatcher and then in 1989 a white paper titled "Roads for Prosperity" was published which was heralded as 'the biggest road building program since the Romans'. Within a few years however, the M25 was carrying far more traffic than was predicted and plans were drawn up to widen the entire motorway. Other road schemes, including the M3 motorway at Twyford Down, the M11 link road, the Newbury bypass etc. were met with unprecedented levels of opposition which led to a review of transport policy starting in the mid-1990s. Steven Norris, later to become a strong advocate of cycling and public transport, was appointed as Under-Secretary of State for Transport in 1992 and in 1994 a new revised edition of Planning Policy Guidance 13 acknowledged officially for the first time that new roads lead to additional traffic making new roads much harder to justify; in July the Secretary of State for Transport Brian Mawhinney launched what he termed a 'Great Debate' over about the future direction for transport in the UK; and then in October a major Royal Commission report, Transport and the Environment was published which highlighted the serious environmental consequences of UK's car-based transport system. By the end of 1995 many road schemes had been canceled and the incoming Labour government following the 1997 general election canceled many of the remaining schemes.
Under New Labour, John Prescott, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions wanted to an increased role for public transport; Labour's first transport white paper "A New Deal for Transport: Better for everyone" was published in 1998 which included a commitment to create a national multi-modal transport information system by the end of 2000. A subsequent White Paper, the 'Transport Ten Year Plan 2000' provided more details of the required work. The project would:- "Stimulate the transport sector to develop high quality information systems", "Enable users to find all available electronic travel information", "Develop integrated information and ticket sales for journeys involving more than one mode of transport" and "Deliver an integrated and comprehensive information service for all travel modes and mode combinations, which was implemented as the Transport Direct Portal."