Analyse Bus Open Data (ABOD) is a new extension service to the Bus Open Data Service (BODS), that provides free-to-access reporting and analytics to operators and authorities nationally.
The service is available now, providing a dashboard overview, feed monitoring, and on-time performance analyses. Further features will also be added later in the year to provide geography-based views of network performance, along with other insights.
Analyse Bus Open Data is part of the Department for Transport’s ongoing investment in bus services, and supports the recently-announced National Bus Strategy, by helping government, local authorities, and bus operators to:
- perform existing bus data analysis in faster and easier ways
- produce more accurate and detailed performance analysis reports
- improve on collaboration between different organisations
- identify network improvement opportunities
- inform transport policy and compliance monitoring across the industry
RTIG is supporting the Department for Transport by promoting the service to ensure operators and authorities know about the service and how they can use it.
We will be holding a series of webinars over the coming months, together with DfT’s technical supplier Ito World, to demonstrate ABOD features and help users understand how to maximise its potential.
Operators and authorities who have not yet received an invitation to get access to ABOD can also request this during the webinars – or in advance by emailing BusOpenData@dft.gov.uk .
The Corridor feature launched in September 2021 lets users compose sequences of stops and perform journey time analysis for the services which run through this chain of stop-to-stop sections. From this release, where Track elements describing the shape of the RouteLinks used by a service have been provided in the TransXChange timetable data submitted to BODS, these are used to estimate the speed of buses along each corridor section. This information will help local authorities to perform pinch point analyses and recommend bus priority measures and service and infrastructure changes.
So far, ABOD users have been able to measure the combined nationwide performance of all services belonging to an operator using the summary statistics in the On-Time Performance section. This update will also introduce the ability to filter performance figures by NPTG administrative area, helping operators and local authorities to understand combined service performance in the context of a bus service improvement plan or partnership. When one or more administrative areas are selected, the performance statistics for operators will consist only of services which run within or through those areas.
