Traveline

Traveline

Founded	2000

Traveline is a public transport route planner service provided by a partnership between local authorities and transport operators in the UK to provide impartial and comprehensive information about public transport which has operated since 2000.^[1] It prepares comprehensive public transport data for the UK and provides a number of regional public transport journey planners.^[2]

History

The organisation was established in 2000.^[3]

A prototype national door-to-door journey for Great Britain (i.e. UK without Northern Ireland) using the Traveline regional journey planners was available for evaluation by 'stakeholders and key opinion formers' by November 2003 and the service was officially launched by Alistair Darling, the then Secretary of State for Transport on 31 December 2004.^[4]

In March 2010 Gordon Brown, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom announced that the NaPTAN dataset would be released as Open Data.^[5]

Operation

The Traveline regions assemble the public transport information within their areas and make it available through a number of local public transport journey planners. As of May 2014, all regions provide information for use within the Google Maps journey planner.

Regional	Journey planner	Notes
East Anglia	MDV
East Midlands	MDV
London	MDV	Transport for London also operates its own MDV system[6]
North East & Cumbria	JourneyPlan
North West	Trapeze[7]
Scotland	Trapeze[8]
South East	MDV
South West	MDV[7]
Wales	Trapeze[9]
West Midlands	MDV
Yorkshire	Trapeze[7]

Details of all bus stops in the country are assembled into the National Public Transport Access Nodes database (NaPTAN) which is updated daily. The organisation also maintains the associated National Public Transport Gazetteer of all place names, both formal and informal, that may be used to indicate the destination for a requested journey. These datasets are provided to both Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. They have also been released as Open Data via data.gov.uk.

Public transport schedules are provided for use with the Transport Direct Portal on a weekly basis for use within the 'national journey planner for Great Britain'.^[2]

Once a year all the schedules for the county by all modes (including the information collected and maintained by Traveline) is assembled into the National Public Transport Data Repository which is prepared every October is used for the creation of Core Accessibility Indicators for every part of the UK.^[10] This data is also used within products such as MySociety's Mapumental.

Some bus operators provide information via the Electronic Bus Service Registration (EBSR) system using the TransXChange when passing information between operators, Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA), Traveline.^[11]

Organisational structure

For operational and data preparation purposes the UK is divided in the following regions/nations:^[12] The boundaries are not identical to the Regions of England.

Name	Members	Notes
Cymru/Wales
East Anglia	Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk
East Midlands	Derby, Derbyshire, Leicester, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, North East Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, Peterborough, Rutland
London	Transport for London
North East & Cumbria	Cumbria, Darlington, Durham, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Northumberland, Redcar and Cleveland, Stockton-on-Tees, Tyne and Wear
Northern Ireland
North West	Blackburn with Darwen, Blackpool, Cheshire East, Cheshire West and Chester, Greater Manchester, Halton, Lancashire, Merseyside, Warrington
Scotland
South East (excluding London)	Bedford, Bracknell Forest, Brighton and Hove, Buckinghamshire Central, Bedfordshire, East Sussex, Essex, Hertfordshire, Isle of Wight, Kent, Luton, Medway, Milton Keynes, Oxfordshire, Reading, Slough, Southend-on-Sea, Surrey, Thurrock, West Berkshire, West Sussex, Windsor and Maidenhead and Wokingham
South West	Bath and North East Somerset, Bournemouth, Bristol, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, North Somerset, Plymouth, Poole, Portsmouth, Somerset, Southampton, South Gloucestershire, Swindon, Torbay and Wiltshire
West Midlands	Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Telford and Wrekin, Warwickshire, West Midlands and Worcestershire
Yorkshire	East Riding of Yorkshire, Kingston upon Hull, North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and York

Advisory body

The advisory body of the national organisation consists of the following organisations:-^[1]

• Confederation of Passenger Transport (CPT)
• Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC)
• Local Government Association (LGA)
• Confederation of Scottish Local Authorities (CoSLA)
• Transport for London (TfL)
• Passenger Transport Executives Group (PTEG)
• Association of Transport Coordinating Officers (ATCO)
• Welsh Assembly Government (WAG)
• Scottish Government
• Department for Transport (DfT)
• Translink

References

1. "What is traveline?". Traveline. Retrieved 8 February 2010.
2. "Traveline Data". PTI. Retrieved 8 February 2010.
3. "History". Traveline. Retrieved 8 February 2010.
4. "History and strategy". Retrieved 7 January 2010.
5. "Speech on Building Britain’s Digital Future". National Archives. Retrieved 29 June 2010.
6. "Planning and corporate panel" (PDF). Transport for London.
7. "Which Website were you after ?". Trapeze. Retrieved 27 March 2010.
8. "Case Study: Traveline Scotland". Trapeze. Retrieved 2 March 2010.
9. "Case Study: PTI Cymru & Modus". Trapeze. Retrieved 27 March 2010.
10. "National Public Transport Data Repository". PTI. Retrieved 8 February 2010.
11. "01-02-08 New bus registration system to improve real-time information for passengers". Department for Transport. Retrieved 27 March 2010.
12. "Public Transport Information". Traveline. Retrieved 8 February 2010.

External links

Traveline official website