Transport Direct

It developed and operates the Transport Direct Portal which is a public facing multi-modal journey planner.

It also supports the creation and management of comprehensive databases of all public transport movements in the United Kingdom with Traveline.

Data is collected for all public transport services running in Great Britain during a full week in October each year.

During 2009-10 Traveline has been developing a national dataset covering local transport details for all parts of the UK which will be updated every week (rather than once a year with the NPTDR).

It is suggested that there should be a clear and consistent copyright and licensing rules applied making it easy to work with data from multiple sources in the public sector.

The magazine reported that "Among the data to be made accessible through the site are trunk road traffic volumes, the National Public Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) database and the National Public Transport Data Repository (NPTDR)".

A DfT spokeswoman was reported to say: "We will seek to embrace new technology to enable partners to provide exciting, user-focused services such as recently seen with satellite navigation and iPhone applications",[20] In March 2010 the Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that the NaPTAN dataset was to be immediately made available from the data.gov.uk site as Open Data, as well as confirming an impending release of Ordnance Survey data.

In his speech he observed that at present public transport timetables and real-time running information was owned by the operating companies but that the government would work to free it up.

[14] The costs of operating Transport Direct and creating the associated portal are funded by central Government.

Work commissioned by the Department in 2000 indicated that the services that Transport Direct seeks to deliver would not be provided by the private sector.

Bus operators were required register their schedules with VOSA which they did on paper at timing point level together with a prose description of the route.

Traveline then organised itself into a regional structure, each of which would develop systems for providing information from telephone call centres in time over the internet.

A specification for the National Public Transport Access Nodes (NaPTAN) database, which would hold the details of every station, coach terminus, airport, ferry terminal, bus stop, etc.

in Great Britain was published in December 2002 together with the associated NPTG standard was also defined and was populated with 50,000 commonly used place names and major points of interest.

[42] RTIG-XML, a data standard for the exchange of real time public transport information was completed in 2003.

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

[38] To put the project in perspective, it was launched prior to the existence of Google Maps (early in 2005)[43] and routing of public transport on Google Maps was not released until December 2005[44] and this service required a feed of data of the type being collected by Transport Direct.

Information was made available from the portal through additional channels during the year, including PDAs, mobile phones and via interactive television via BSkyB, cable and Freeview set-top boxes with a modem or broadband connection.

[47] Also in 2006 the Service Interface for Real Time Information (SIRI), which was developed with support from Transport Direct was adopted as a CEN standard.

[48] In 2007 data for buses and coaches in the South East England Traveline Region was made available to Google Transit.

[50] In March 2009 Transport Direct added cycle journey planning to the Portal for Manchester and Merseyside.