Transport
We like buses. We like Bus Open Data. We are building an archive of Bus Open Data. An archive will allow us, and many others, to see how policy has influenced people's live in the past, for better or for worse, and how we could improve our bus networks to make people's lives better in the future.
This is not just a bunch of bus nerds doing something cool with data. This is about making people's live better by making more informed decisions, backed by real data.
So we have made a prototype for creating an archive of BODS data.
Our plans
Recently, we visisted the fantastic South West Institute of Technology to attend an event titled "Transport Data Science: Rethinking Accessibility". We noticed that there is an immense appetite for access to an archive of BODS. We also became aware of a BODS archive that is being collected at the University of Exeter, which goes back to February 2024 and has now reached around 5TB of data.
As a result, we are currently:
- Working with amazing colleagues at the University of Exeter to make their archive available for public use.
- Producing an open-source codebase for anyone to create an archive, along with code to process and analyse the raw data.
Research questions
There are so many possibilities. Some of our initial ideas include:
- Quantifying the impact of the Bee Network in Manchester (and more generally the performance of franchised bus networks compared to what they are replacing).
- Measuring the average road speed at different times of day on every road in Great Britain that has a bus running on it.
Why we care
Academics, policy-makers, private businesses, and transport enthusiasts across the UK use Open Bus Data to understand how our bus networks function. Bus timetables allow us to model journey times between different places and calculate the accessibility by public transport of services, workplaces, and attractions. Real-time bus data allows us to see how effective our bus networks are, and what level of service is really provided to the public (not just what the timetable says). All real-time journey planning tools, such as bustimes.org and Citymapper rely on real-time location data. We consider buses, and the data they produce, to be a part of our national infrastructure.
You can read more about some of the work we have done in the blogs below.