6 Jul 2022 by Jonathan Raper

TransportAPI is delighted to announce that we have begun working on a  discovery of open bus fares with Traveline this month. The  Bus Services Act 2017 created a duty on operators to publish their fares for the first time  and the DfT set up the  Bus Open Data Service (BODS) to serve out the data.  TAPI Bus Fares is the  first national source of bus fares from BODS behind an API, translating  the complex Netex files from the operators into  an easy-to-use form for application developers and data scientists.

Traveline is a partnership of transport companies, local authorities and passenger groups that have come together to bring you information for all travel in Great Britain by bus, rail, coach and ferry. TransportAPI will be working with Traveline to explore the potential of the bus fares data to help travellers get the best bus fares for their journeys. We would welcome a dialogue with operators where we can jointly help improve the data.

The Netex data standard is new and not all operators have provided full fares information yet. Hence TransportAPI is undertaking a deep analysis of the bus fares in BODS to identify the challenges and opportunities for Traveline to publish bus fares alongside their existing travel information services. We are expecting a lot of interest in the publication of bus fares as this has been missing link when costing journeys across the country. However the data has to be accurate, up-to-date and informative to be useful, which is why this discovery project is a necessary first step to publishing bus fares data for travellers.