Traveline


Traveline is a public transport route planner service provided by a partnership between local authorities and transport operators in the UK to provide impartial and comprehensive information about public transport which has operated since 2000. It prepares comprehensive public transport data for the UK and provides a number of regional public transport journey planners.

History

Following on from a successful prototype one-number travel service developed by Lancashire County Council in 1999, the national Traveline organisation was established in 2000.
A prototype national door-to-door journey for Great Britain - using the Lancashire Traveline model for regional journey planners - was available for evaluation by 'stakeholders and key opinion formers' by November 2003, and the service was officially launched by Alistair Darling, the then Secretary of State for Transport on 31 December 2004.
In March 2010, Gordon Brown, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom announced that the NaPTAN dataset would be released as Open Data.

Operation

The Traveline regions assemble the public transport information within their areas and make it available through a number of local public transport journey planners. As of May 2014, all regions provide information for use within the Google Maps journey planner, and as of December 2016 all regions were added to the Apple Maps journey planner.
RegionalJourney plannerNotes
East AngliaMDV
East MidlandsMDV
LondonMDVTransport for London also operates its own MDV system
North East & CumbriaJourneyPlan
North WestTrapeze
ScotlandTrapeze
South EastMDV
South WestMDV
WalesTrapeze
West MidlandsMDV
YorkshireTrapeze

Details of all bus stops in the country are assembled into the National Public Transport Access Nodes database which is updated daily. The organisation also maintains the associated National Public Transport Gazetteer of all place names, both formal and informal, that may be used to indicate the destination for a requested journey. These datasets are provided to both Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. They have also been released as Open Data via data.gov.uk.
Public transport schedules are provided for use with the Transport Direct Portal on a weekly basis for use within the 'national journey planner for Great Britain'.
Once a year all the schedules for the county by all modes is assembled into the National Public Transport Data Repository which is prepared every October is used for the creation of Core Accessibility Indicators for every part of the UK. This data is also used within products such as MySociety's Mapumental.
Some bus operators provide information via the Electronic Bus Service Registration system using the TransXChange when passing information between operators, Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, Traveline.

Organisational structure

For operational and data preparation purposes the UK is divided in the following regions/nations: The boundaries are not identical to the Regions of England.
NameMembersNotes
Cymru/Wales
East AngliaCambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk
East MidlandsDerby, Derbyshire, Leicester, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, North East Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, Peterborough, Rutland
LondonTransport for London
North East & CumbriaCumbria, Darlington, Durham, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Northumberland, Redcar and Cleveland, Stockton-on-Tees, Tyne and Wear
Northern Ireland
North WestBlackburn with Darwen, Blackpool, Cheshire East, Cheshire West and Chester, Greater Manchester, Halton, Lancashire, Merseyside, Warrington
Scotland
South East Bedford, Bracknell Forest, Brighton and Hove, Buckinghamshire, Central Bedfordshire, East Sussex, Essex, Hertfordshire, Isle of Wight, Kent, Luton, Medway, Milton Keynes, Oxfordshire, Reading, Slough, Southend-on-Sea, Surrey, Thurrock, West Berkshire, West Sussex, Windsor and Maidenhead and Wokingham
South WestBath and North East Somerset, Bournemouth, Bristol, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, North Somerset, Plymouth, Poole, Portsmouth, Somerset, Southampton, South Gloucestershire, Swindon, Torbay and Wiltshire
West MidlandsHerefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Telford and Wrekin, Warwickshire, West Midlands and Worcestershire
YorkshireEast Riding of Yorkshire, Kingston upon Hull, North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and York

Advisory body

The advisory body of the national organisation consists of the following organisations:-