Jonathan Raper, managing director of the TransportAPI talks to Colin Sowman about the benefits open data can bring to the public transport sector.
That the digital revolution would change the world, including transport, was never in doubt but the question has always been: how? Now, with the ‘Millennium Bug’ relegated to a question on quiz shows, the potential and challenges of digital technology are starting to take shape - and Jonathan Raper is in the vanguard. Raper is managing director of the open data transport information supplier
His company operates in the new space created by open data to collect, verify, collate and format transport information such as live train, metro bus and tram arrivals/departures throughout the UK. While an HTML version is available for individuals to view free of charge, in most cases the data is supplied en masse through an application program interface (API) to organisations including app developers, transport providers and local authorities. The information is then used as a feed for the authority’s or company’s own travel information screens, websites, apps and other services.
While as far back as 2003 the European Union first introduced regulations requiring the release of data from public funded bodies, the enthusiasm to embrace open data has varied between member states. In 2009 the open data revolution started gaining traction and the UK was at the forefront, requiring publically funded bodies to release all available data (that being data which is not already being traded commercially). The Greater London Authority was the first public body to release open data on a large scale when the Mayor of London opened the London Data Store in 2009.
When this movement started Raper was lecturing at the City University in London (he remains a visiting professor), and in 2010, data from the UK’s state-funded agencies began to be widely available. “Transport emerged as the single most significant stream of open data because transport information is a daily requirement for everybody,” he observes.
When Transport for London’s arrival and departure information became freely available and others followed, Raper realised the opportunity and started the company. Today TransportAPI has nine staff and some 1,200 organisations are registered to use the service including airports, rail service providers and city authorities. “Authorities and companies come to us and say ‘we need information about transport in particular area or on a certain corridor’. We collect, verify and sort the information they need and provide an API feed [a universal format much favoured by app and website developers] to the customer to do with as they will.
“The source is open data and when it leaves us it remains open data,” he says, adding that this type of information is most useful when it is disseminated as widely as possible, and as quickly as possible.
Transport is one of the big winners in the open data revolution because the travel situation changes so rapidly and travellers often start their journeys at different times, use different modes and head for different destinations. This means there is a demand for the data every minute of every day.
But is Raper not simply making money from selling freely available data? “The source material, the live data, is freely available to everybody although to get a complete picture a user may need to search several data streams and use different protocols. Few individuals could manage that and even fewer would want to go to such lengths to check their commute to work.”
The problem, he says, is that when the individual travel companies and agencies set up their data and computer networks, they were designed for internal use in a closed and secure ecosystem. Consequently, the architecture has been designed to restrict and not facilitate the outward passage of data and unusual and bespoke methodologies and protocols are better from the security perspective. For these reasons the streams of open data that are available from the various agencies and companies often come in different or even bespoke formats.
Organisations wanting to obtain (or provide) the complete travel picture in any or all areas, will also need to convert all the streams to a common protocol. In addition, a single stream may cover rail journeys across the country or just local bus services in one part of town and this may or may not coincide with what an authority or company wants.
Saving money
“Authorities and companies, even churches and pubs, usually approach us asking if we can help them provide information about all travel modes in their geographic area. We have actually saved authorities money where the various departments have had separate subscriptions to different services providing similar data - now, all departments can work off our feed without any limitation,” he says.
While users in the UK benefit from the availability of open data, Raper is acutely aware that this situation is not mirrored elsewhere - particularly in countries with strong state-owned transport providers. “When we enquire about obtaining the data, what we hear is: ‘we spent a lot of money developing and operating this system, why should we give the data away and how does that fit with the user-pays principle’?
“But that misses several key points,” he says. “In a state-funded system the public has already paid for the data to be collected so it should be freely available and it also raises the question as to whether civil servants are best positioned to decide who can best use that data. What’s more, it must be in the transport provider’s interest that the travelling public has good access to information about the current travel situation because if they do, then they are more likely to use and rely on those services. That’s why users’ comment about their travel experience via the likes of Twitter and Facebook can be, shall we say, highly inaccurate and incomplete.
“By releasing the data, a transport authority can start the process of providing the widest and easiest access to their own highly accurate data and regain much more control over the wider information flow. Whereas, if they continue doing what they have been doing, they will only get what they already have. At a European level we are seeing reluctance on the part of the Commission and national governments to tackle the monoliths such as state-owned railways.
“If they did open their data these countries could experience the same ‘gold rush’ we saw in the UK with private money invested into transport information which brought about the likes of Citymapper and Hailo taxi calling service [a forerunner to Uber].”
That’s not to say that all the open data battles have been won in the UK. Raper and his team are still working on a ‘one-stop’ service that shows the ticket prices for the myriad of competing train and bus companies running the same service. “The current sites are designed to show the user the most direct, and often most expensive, services rather than highlighting that if I take the slower service on the scenic route, the ticket price is halved. And none of the current operator ticket sites certainly won’t show split ticketing [where a single journey is paid for by two tickets in order to take advantage of off-peak pricing].
He cites Japan and Taiwan as established examples of how transport data can help inform and improve the travelling experience whereas in America the dominance of the car means that apart from cities like San Francisco, Boston and New York, the scope is much narrower.
Maximising access
Globally, many authorities claim they already release the data because they supply it to a selected third party. But according to Raper, that simply replaces a monopoly with an oligopoly - both of which exclude the entrepreneurs needed to find new markets for the information.
This brings him onto his other pet topic: Google and the other Californian-based service providers.
“The other argument I hear is when authorities say they are complying with open data regulations because they release their data to the likes of Google which then incorporates it in services such as the traffic speed overlays on Google Maps. That’s fine as far as it goes, but that is likely to be as far as the information spreads and again other companies like app and web designers may not be able to access the data. When signing agreements with organisations like Google or Microsoft, I would urge authorities and private companies to read the supply agreement carefully because it could prevent the data being disclosed to other companies. This includes the data aggregators and the app and web designers who can produce the bespoke information sources travellers find so useful.
He concludes with something of a rallying cry to transport authorities, saying: “Now is the time embrace to digital technology and all it brings with it; not to close ranks in order to fight yesterday’s battles.”
