The Transport Direct Programme was a division of the UK Department for Transport (DfT) 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 (building on NaPTAN and NPTG). JourneyWeb, a protocol to allow the development of a distributed journey planning service (which became the Transport Direct Portal). 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
Other organisations involved in this work included Traveline, the Real Time Information Group (RTIG), the Association of Transport Coordinating Officers (ATCO) and the Confederation of Passenger Transport (CPT) as well a number of system suppliers.
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 (South East Traveline Region) 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 National Public Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) 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 (Coach 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 (Identification of Fixed Objects In Public Transport or 'IFOPT') 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 National Public Transport Gazetteer 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 (NPTDR) 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 (ATOC) 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 (Previously there was a charge made for this dataset).
Datasets available: October 2004 dataset October 2005 dataset October 2006 dataset October 2007 dataset October 2008 dataset October 2009 dataset October 2010 dataset
National Coach Services Database The National Coach Services Database contains details of all 'limited-stop coach services' in the UK, including those of National Express EasyBus and Scottish Citylink This dataset is not available as open data.
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 (rather than once a year with the NPTDR). 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 (NaPTAN) database and the National Public Transport Data Repository (NPTDR)". 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 (Portal and other necessary works) 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 Bus deregulation in Great Britain in 1985 allowed operators to determine routes and frequencies (except in London) 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.