Freeing up data makes perfect business sense

Giving public transport users full, free and reliable data on their smartphone apps will help boost patronage

Chris Osbourne: Bradshaw showed the way, he says

Chris Osbourne: Bradshaw showed the way, he says

This image by ITO World visualises the London bus network in a completely new way. Development director Christopher Osborne believes that adapting data to new and radical uses will help more people onto buses and trains.

This image by ITO World visualises the London bus network in a completely new way. Development director Christopher Osborne believes that adapting data to new and radical uses will help more people onto buses and trains.

The ‘open data’ agenda – the drive to make information more freely available and accessible to the public – is not exactly new for the public transport sector.

In Victorian Britain, when there was a largely uncoordinated rail network and some 150 rail companies, one man, George Bradshaw, aggregated and reformatted a mass of data from all these sources, in multiple and different formats. 

This point was made by Christopher Osborne, development director, ITO World,...