Bus Routes

During the recent 30 Day Map Challenge I published a report with many of Europe's railway routes, which gained a lot of interest. I thought I'd see whether the same thing was possible for bus routes.

I'd sourced the data for the railway networks from OpenStreetMap, but it seems OpenStreetMap doesn't have sufficient data for bus routes - it's either inconsistent or partially populated.

However, I found that the Department for Transport has a Bus Open Data Site. This seems a great source of data, and I've only had chance to scratch the surface. I've started with timetable data. There's a lot of it! For starters, buses stop a lot more than trains, so there are a lot more stops, and the coordinates between each stop along the routes are detailed, as again, roads have many more turns (and roundabouts!) than railway lines.

The data downloads are large, so I've focussed on just one operator for now, the GoAhead group and downloaded their timetable data for the North East. This report represents all of their routes. A Power BI slicer enables you to pick a route, or alternatively you can search for a specific stop and all the routes that service that stop will be displayed. The chosen stop is highlighted in red.

Hovering over a stop with the mouse cursor will display the timetable information for all the buses that service that stop.

There are complexities, and nuances in the data that I haven't represented in the report, but it was a good proof of concept to see what could be achieved with bus data in a few hours. I see there's an API to retrieve the realtime locations of buses, so I'm looking forward to an excuse to explore that!