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Liverpool-UK / somebody-should

A place to collect issues/suggestions/to-do items for the city of Liverpool
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Improve open transport data across the region #29

Open amcewen opened 7 years ago

amcewen commented 7 years ago

The visualisation in #28 is missing almost all of the bus traffic across Merseyside. That seems to be because transit.land, which is what TransitFlow uses as its data source, doesn't have the bus GTFS feeds for Merseyside in it.

We should find (/encourage the publishing of) GTFS feeds for all the bus operators in Merseyside, and the ferries:

What other ones are there? Do we need to get data for them too?

ajlennon commented 7 years ago

Arriva -

https://www.arrivabus.co.uk/contact-us/utilise-our-real-time-data-output/

ajlennon commented 7 years ago

I wonder where this fits in?

http://www.travelinedata.org.uk/traveline-open-data/nextbuses-api/

amcewen commented 7 years ago

It's the GTFS feed that gets submitted to transit.land, which is timetable info rather than real-time.

Real-time data would be nice (and I think @paulfurley had heard about there being a timetable, if you'll forgive the pun, for it being released, but I haven't spotted it yet), but as an addition to the timetable data. (Or at least, I haven't got an easy visualisation tool for real-time data, so the timetable info would also be good :-)

That Traveline link did lead me to the data.gov.uk dataset of registered bus operators which has a list of all the operators and the services they operate. I've added the ones from that which don't seem to be school buses or sightseeing ones to the list to get.

fawkesley commented 6 years ago

To get it out of my inbox, here’s the relevant bit of the discussion I had in 2014:

----- Original message -----
From: "Thorpe, Janet" <janet.thorpe@merseytravel.gov.uk>
To: Paul M Furley <paul@paulfurley.com>, "Jenkins, Huw" <huw.jenkins@merseytravel.gov.uk>Cc: "Holcroft, Steven" <steven.holcroft@liverpool.gov.uk>, "Buntin, Paul" <paul.buntin@merseytravel.gov.uk>, "Leonard, Steve" <steve.leonard@merseytravel.gov.uk>Subject: RE: Smart cities: Unexpected uses of public transport data
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 14:02:17 +0000

Hi Paul

The scheduled and real time data will be available under the Open
Government Licence but we don’t currently have an API.  We have asked
our supplier for a quote for providing one, but we don’t have any
timescales at the moment sorry.
Let me know if you need any more info.

Thanks
Janet

From: Paul M Furley [mailto:paul@paulfurley.com]
Sent: 12 December 2014 16:18
To: Jenkins, Huw
Cc: Holcroft, Steven; Buntin, Paul; Leonard, Steve; Thorpe, Janet
Subject: Re: Smart cities: Unexpected uses of public transport data

Thanks Huw,

Thanks for pointing me to the journey planner - that's great!

As I see it the two barriers for the community benefiting this sort of
data are 1) licensing and 2) technical.
On the licensing issue, is the transport data available under the Open
Government Licence
<http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/>
(or could it be)? This is (more or less) how TFL do it
<https://www.tfl.gov.uk/info-for/open-data-users/our-open-data>.
On the technical front - Janet - is there a public-facing API that those
apps use, and does it have documentation somewhere? If not is there any
way I (or the community) can help make that available?
If we can get this stuff out into the open I'd be up for organising a
hack-weekend in the new year to get some cool things built :)
Thanks everyone for your help so far!

Kind regards,

Paul

On 12 December 2014 at 15:48, Jenkins, Huw <huw.jenkins@merseytravel.gov.uk<mailto:huw.jenkins@merseytravel.gov.uk>> wrote:Thanks Steve and Paul

You may be aware that Merseytravel has recently introduced a new travel
app (available on Android, Apple and PC):-
http://www.merseytravel.gov.uk/travelling-around/pages/journey-planner.aspx
This is now being fed by real time bus data on many services, which
stems from the GPS systems in the on-board ticketing machines.
In terms of any potentially opening up of this data, and linking the
‘app’ data to other platforms, I’d suggest speaking to my colleague
Janet Thorpe in our ICT department at janet.thorpe@merseytravel.gov.uk<-
mailto:janet.thorpe@merseytravel.gov.uk>, as Janet has much greater
technical knowledge than me.
I trust that this helps,

Regards, Huw

Huw Jenkins
Policy Development Manager
Merseytravel

0151 330 1110

From: Holcroft, Steven [mailto:steven.holcroft@liverpool.gov.uk<mailto:steven.holcroft@liverpool.gov.uk>]Sent: 11 December 2014 17:19
To: Jenkins, Huw
Cc: 'paul@paulfurley.com<mailto:paul@paulfurley.com>'
Subject: FW: Smart cities: Unexpected uses of public transport data

Huw,

Can you assist Paul with this? Please could you copy me into your
response for future reference given the increased interest in open data.
Thanks
Steve
Steve Holcroft I Regeneration & Employment
Liverpool City Council I Municipal Buildings I Dale Street I
Liverpool I L2 2DHT: 0151 233 4530 I M: 07753 812066 I E: steven.holcroft@liverpool.gov.uk<mailto:steven.holcroft@liverpool.gov.uk>Online: www.liverpool.gov.uk<http://www.liverpool.gov.uk/>

On Mon, 11 Sep 2017, at 12:05, Adrian McEwen wrote:

It's the GTFS feed that [gets submitted to transit.land](), which is timetable info rather than real-time.

Real-time data would be nice (and I think @paulfurley had heard about> there being a timetable, if you'll forgive the pun, for it being released, but I haven't spotted it yet), but as an addition to the timetable data. (Or at least, I haven't got an easy visualisation tool> for real-time data, so the timetable info would also be good :-)

That Traveline link did lead me to the data.gov.uk dataset of registered> bus operators> which has a list of all the operators and the services they operate. I've added the ones from that which don't seem to be school buses or sightseeing ones to the list to get.

-- You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/Liverpool-UK/somebody-should/issues/29#issuecomment-328508724

amcewen commented 6 years ago

There's an article on the Echo website today about Merseytravel moving to a more digital approach for timetables. Following a reply from @Merseytravel to me mentioning this issue I've dropped them an email to ask about it, and CCed Janet. I'll update when I hear back.

amcewen commented 5 years ago

Just realised I didn't report back on what I heard back from Merseytravel (they got back to me in about a week after my message):

We currently provide our bus real time feed to ITO World, who then pass it on to interested 3rd parties via an API. A concern has been that if we made the data freely available (from one of our internal servers) we could end up with and endless amounts of real time requests grinding our network to a halt, with no guaranteed end product.

Hopefully you will have some success through the suggested channel but, if not, please do not hesitate to get back in touch.

I didn't have much joy finding anything on the ITO World site, but didn't have much time then to dig into it any further...

amcewen commented 4 years ago

The government has just announced regulations for open bus data - timetable data by the end of the year, location data next year.

mem48 commented 4 years ago

Hi, I'm working on something that may be of interest at https://itsleeds.github.io/UK2GTFS/ which has some example UK GTFS files here: https://github.com/ITSLeeds/UK2GTFS/releases/tag/0.003 I'm looking for people to test and provide feedback if you're interested.