2 Nov 2022 by Jonathan Raper
TransportAPI was launched in 2012 with a vision to organise and scale all of public transport information through APIs to organisations and individuals everywhere. Transport for London was our launch customer when they approached us to provide Overground train departure boards using the newly released open rail data for the 2012 London Olympics. Since our launch, there have been over 12,000 signups on TransportAPI and we have become one of the largest providers of public transport data in the country.
We are proud to be able to celebrate our decade of achievement with the Open Data Institute who are also 10 years old on the 1st of December 2022. The ODI provided accelerator space to TransportAPI as a start-up, and today we thank them and we recognise them for the huge boost they gave us in our early years.
Since 2012 we have expanded our offer dramatically and we now deliver through a managed service model where we ingest, maintain, analyse, publish and archive transport data at scale from all the key national sources. Since COVID we have launched TAPI Bus fares, TAPI Bus Performance and added Bus-on-a-Map tracking and bus route geometry features into the TAPI Bus information managed service, mostly based on the Bus Open Data Service. We also now offer data in GTFS format as weekly downloads for all modes of transport in GB in addition to delivery through our JSON API.
The table above shows how TransportAPI managed services (yellow) and their product features (green) cover the journey timeline (columns) and the functional areas of mobility/ accessibility (rows). TransportAPI managed services deliver on B2B use cases for digital agencies, operators, local transport authorities, transport solution providers and hubs like airports. We will be covering the most popular product features by market segment in upcoming posts.
Our current TAPI Labs beta programme is also publishing Disruption messaging for the Transport for the North area using SIRI-SX, Rail fares for GB, and Rail performance based on live running data. If you would like to test any of our managed services, contact us, and we can offer you access through our Commercial trial. Meanwhile, our permanent free service continues to offer limited access to the core product features of Bus and Rail information on an ongoing basis.
We now deliver most product features by eCommerce through our Home and Business plans (charged by request) as set out on our Terms page (excludes Bus fares and Bus performance). You can register on our developer site, put in a card and select a paid plan yourself. If you need more than 1000 requests a day and/ or you need to deliver into an operational environment requiring us to monitor and support, contact us with details of the managed services and features of interest so we can put together an offer for you.