Commercial bus operators and local authorities in England must use this service to publish bus timetable data.
Who must publish bus data?
All operators who run local bus services in England must publish their data. This includes operators of cross-border services coming from Wales or Scotland into England.
Community bus operators with exemptions under Section 19 or 22 of the Local Government Act 1985 do not currently have to publish their data.
Using published bus data
The bus open data service provides bus timetable data for every local bus service in England. It will eventually include fares and real-time bus locations. The ‘Find bus data’ service will explain how you can use access and use this data.
To use this service you need to be:
- registered as a user
- able to generate data in the required TransXchange standard
Register to use the 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 have not received an email, or you are a new operator, please contact the Department for Transport.
How to use the service
How you share data via the Bus Open Data Service depends on how many routes you operate.
40 routes or fewer
If you run up to 40 routes, you can upload your data direct to the service.
More than 40 routes
If you run more than 40 routes, you will need to host the data on your own web space and share the URLs via the service.
TransXchange
All data must be published using the TransXchange standard.
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.
To get in touch email: busopendata@dft.gov.uk.