Improving public transport data quality in the UK

We are giving advance notice of a new free data quality service from ITO, to assist with the further improvement of the quality of the UK’s public transport data.

ITO has worked with Traveline and Transport Direct for several years to provide the public transport data improvement services to the professional transport sector. In particular our ‘ITO NaPTAN’ and ‘ITO Quality’ services, which have supported a considerable improvement in the quality of data in a number of key areas.

There is however much still more that can be done. To support this, ITO will soon launch a new schedule quality service, which will incorporate new checks and have a clearer user interface. In particular, it will be easier to identify:

• missing stops and wrong bearings
• variation in times between services linking the same stops
• conflicting information provided by different parties for cross-boundary services
• errors with dates and date ranges
• issues relating to school services and school dates

This service will be available to professional users without charge, and ITO will provide uninterrupted access to the current service in the interim, using your existing ITO Quality user credentials.

We appreciate and acknowledge continued support from Traveline and the DfT for the NaPTAN service, which will be unaffected by this change.