Should we be releasing transport data for free, ask councils

Local Authority transport officers this week voiced reluctance to make data on traffic and public transport available for free.

Their concerns were voiced at the Open Data and Transport conference organised by Local Transport Today and sponsored by consultant WSP.

IT developer Chris Osbourne, development director at ITO World, urged councils to make datasets available for commercial reuse just as Transport for London and the Greater Manchester PTE have done.

“Just do it,” he said. “The London Datastore has only cost £10,000 and used very simple tools like a Wordpress blog. Don’t ask your legal team. They probably don’t know about Open Data.”

But Lucy Bath, transport policy team leader for Somerset County Council, told delegates: “My understanding is that we don’t have to release any transport information for free that has commercial value.” She said officers wanted “to get value-for-money for the taxpayer”.

Ann Castle, group leader of the Greater Manchester Transportation Unit, was also reluctant to release data freely. “It costs a lot of money to carry out traffic surveys,” she said. “Should we just make that available?”

But Martyn Lewis, planning & commercial manager at Stagecoach, said making data freely available was the way forward.

“We’ve given up the notion that we can make money out of our data,” he said. “We’ve been through a paradigm shift and now realise that releasing data free to market is the way to go. If we increase the information for bus users, that increases our revenue.”

Delegates heard that the Smartphone applications running off the NextBus API (Application Programme Interface) launched last year are now receiving one million queries a month from passengers on bus running information.

The conference also heard from the Ordnance Survey and the Highways Agency, both of whom accepted the need to release data. But the OS said it wanted to retain its high-end products and the HA said that its data could not necessarily be released in a timely fashion in formats that could be reused.