The Transport Direct Programme was a division of the UK Department for Transport (DfT) to develop standards, data and better information technology systems to support public transport. 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. During 2010 two key datasets were released as Open Data and published on www.data.gov.uk .
The closure of the portal was announced in September 2014 and the portal closed on 30 September 2014.
Transport Direct Portal
The journey planner was a public-facing multi-modal door-to-door journey planner website for Great Britain which provided options for both public transport and car-based options and included an option for cyclists in some parts of the country.
Standards
A number of data standards were developed to support the collection, transfer and management of the required transport data:- CycleNetXChange a UK data protocol for exchanging information about infrastructure to support the development of a national cycle journey planning function within the Transport Direct Portal. IFOPT, a CEN standard for defining public transport access information (building on NaPTAN and NPTG). JourneyWeb, a protocol to allow the development of a distributed journey planning service (which became the Transport Direct Portal). NaPTAN for the exchange of information associated with bus stops, railway station and other public transport access point. NPTG for the exchange of information about places and points of interest. SIRI, a CEN standard for exchanging real-time public transport information. TransXChange, a UK data protocol for the exchange of public transport schedules in conjunction with Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, Arriva and Stagecoach Group
Other organisations involved in this work included Traveline, the Real Time Information Group (RTIG), the Association of Transport Coordinating Officers (ATCO) and the Confederation of Passenger Transport (CPT) as well a number of system suppliers.
Data resources
The development of Transport Direct has created a number of comprehensive national datasets to support the Transport Direct Portal. The assessment of accessibility to services by public transport was made a requirement for the Local Transport Plans in 2004. Measuring the level of accessibility required the use of the data collected by Transport Direct.
This data is being used by an increasing number of 3rd parties, including Google Transit (South East Traveline Region) and East Anglia / East Midlands Traveline Regions. MySociety's Mapumental accessibility product. During 2010 increasing amounts of data has become available as Open Data including NaPTAN and NPTDR.
National Public Transport Access Nodes database (NaPTAN)
The National Public Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) dataset is a UK nationwide system for uniquely identifying all the points of access to public transport in the UK. The dataset, which is open data contains details of some 360,000 nodes including every UK railway station, bus station (Coach station), airport, ferry terminal, bus stop, taxi rank or other place where public transport can be joined; it also details all public entrances to transport hubs and can contain details of airport gates, railway platforms and ferry berths. Each element is allocated a unique 'NaPTAN identifier'. Each entry is linked with one or more localities in the National Public Transport Gazetteer.
It is updated on data.gov.uk every three months.
The CEN standard (Identification of Fixed Objects In Public Transport or 'IFOPT') integrates many concepts used in the NaPTAN standard into a European standard for stop identification as an extension to Transmodel which is the European standard for Public Transport information.
Elements of the NaPTAN are used in the timetable data provided by the Bus Open Data Service
National Public Transport Gazetteer
The National Public Transport Gazetteer is a dataset detailing some 50,000 place names for cities, town, villages, hamlets and suburbs in the UK. It is available as open data from data.gov.uk.
National Public Transport Data Repository
The National Public Transport Data Repository (NPTDR) is a snapshot of all public transport schedules for the UK including bus, tram, train, ferry coach and rail. A dataset is created each year for October and the most recent version is available as open data from data.gov.uk.
