Publish bus open data
Bus operators and local authorities in England must use this service to publish bus timetable, location and fares data.
Applies to England
Register to start publishing on the Bus Open Data Service
If you run a local bus service in England you should have received an email inviting you to register for an account.
If you’ve not received an email, or you’re a new operator, contact the Help Desk.
Once you’ve registered, you’ll be able to access publish your bus data.
Who must publish bus data
All operators who run local bus services in England outside London must publish their data. This includes operators of cross-border services such as those running into and outside of London and Wales – or Scotland into England.
Community bus operators with exemptions under Section 19 or 22 of the Transport Act 1985 do not currently have to publish their data.
This includes:
- coach services
- tour services
- unregistered dedicated school services or those services which have been voluntarily registered as a dedicated school service
However, tour services are not exempt if they take any passengers on point-to-point journeys rather than a full tour. All other local bus services are in scope for data publication.
Publishing your bus data
How to publish timetables data
All data must be published using the latest version of the TransXChange PTI profile. The detailed documentation describing the PTI profile is held on the PTI website.
TransXChange is the UK standard for exchanging bus schedules and related data. The TransXChange web pages provide an overview on TransXChange, including the TransXChange 2.4 schema, which explains the technical rules for producing TransXChange.
The easiest ways to produce TransXChange are to use:
- your existing timetabling software
- our TransXChange tool
TransXChange tool
The TransXChange tool enables you to produce PTI compliant TransXChange bus timetable data.
Download the .
If you require a version for Mac or Libre Office, or if you need additional support, contact [email protected].
How to publish location data
We recommend that you contact your electronic ticket machine (ETM) supplier and ask them to share the automatic vehicle location (AVL) feed. They should be expecting your request and will know the information you will need.
Once you have this information, use BODS to publish this feed.
How to publish fares data
Operators who have ETM suppliers can also talk with them about hosted NeTEx solutions, or they can use the free ‘Create fares data’ service to produce data in NeTEx standard format.
Helping others to use your data
The bus open data service will provide bus timetable, vehicle location and fares data for every local bus service in England.
The ‘Find bus data’ service explains how you can use access and use this data.
We’ll expect application developers and researchers to access the data once it’s been published on BODS. It’ll be important to maintain the data you’ve published to ensure that journey planning applications are accurate and improve passenger experience.
Consumers will also be able to give feedback to you about the quality of your data to help improve and maintain it.
Contacts
To get in touch, email us at [email protected].
Updates to this page
Published 28 January 2020Last updated 31 May 2022 + show all updates
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Latest version of the TransXchange tool added.
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Latest version of the TransXchange tool added.
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Updated how to publish bus timetables data and added the latest version of the TransXChange tool.
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The guidance has been updated to reflect changes to the Bus Open Data Service.
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First published.