Public transport journey planning has a public purpose - get people efficiently to their destination.
This planning function *might* not have financial compensation - there might be no ticket sale involved.
The likes of Trainline then have very little incentive as I see it to provide excellent journey planning. But if they can’t, and the likes of DB won’t, internationally… then who can?
@jon Here's one option: an EU agency tasked with achieving modal shift from cars and planes to buses and trains. In a similar way to National Rail Enquiries in the UK, it would offer a journey planning facility, and would provide vendor-neutral information on all publicly available fares.
It would be so attractive to use that rail operators and ticket sellers would demand to be included so that they didn't miss out on the increased sales and traffic.
@sccook @jon Good idea. This could be a task for the EU Agency for Railways (ERA) but I’m not sure they should be running the actual planner.
I think it would be better for the ERA to act as the data hub. All players that wish to take part send their data to the ERA. They clean it up, repackage it, and then make it available via an API for the market to develop products around.
There are numerous examples of public bodies doing precisely this.
@jon @sccook A new law if you want to make it compulsory to share the data.
I read the suggestion as not making data sharing compulsory but letting competition sort it out as operators don’t want to lose out on extra income. Especially not if open access operators are the first ones out of the gate with providing data.
You could then, later, consider making data sharing compulsory if there are obvious (or crucial) stragglers.
Jon Worth
Stephen Cook
Lennard van Otterloo