Transport Data Strategy – Innovation through data

Introduction

Doing so will help us meet the DfT’s strategic objectives of growing and levelling up the economy, decarbonising the transport system, improving transport for the user, and increasing our global impact.

Analytics can add value in many ways: providing new operational and policy insights that help ‘nudge’ people towards more active and greener travel, improving interconnectivity between modes and fuelling journey planning apps and services that make travel easier. It can also help optimise local traffic management systems to reduce air pollution and support digital tools that can manage our transport systems and networks more effectively.

Data powers innovation and can help unlock new opportunities to do things differently – it can offer new products and services providing customer benefits, new jobs and trade opportunities. Faster, more responsive data increases situational awareness and improves resilience in the face of increasing threats to transport and other areas, such as climate change, pandemics, and terrorism.

The more data is shared and combined with other data sets in new and innovative ways (through secure and ethical frameworks), the more value it unlocks. However, data too often resides in modal and geographical isolation. This hinders the innovation that delivers customer and commercial value to meet our societal challenges, such as creating more liveable communities. The situation is further complicated because it is not just transport data that needs to be linked and integrated. For instance, decarbonising the transport sector requires a range of data sources (i.e. electric vehicle chargepoint, emissions, traffic and active

travel data) to be combined. Additionally, there has historically been a significant gap in the availability of a wide range of real-time transport data – the type of data needed to take innovation to the next level.

The reasons why data is not being shared are well researched. There is no single underlying cause but a plethora of reasons (some of which vary by geography and topic), including:

• Discoverability – not being able to find the data needed

• Privacy, security and ethical concerns as well as wider cultural factors within organisations – not being able to

• Legal, monetary and contractual barriers – being uncertain over what can be shared, and at what level.

• Lack of widespread data literate culture and technical skills across the transport sectors – not knowing how to share and how to extract value from the

• Lack of incentives to invest in and make data available – not being able to make the business case to unlock the funding and resources to share.

• Data standards and Quality – not knowing in what format to share and being concerned about sharing imperfect

• A lack of leadership in the transport data sector – not prioritising or valuing sharing or having a clear sense of purpose as to why we are sharing data.

The Department has already made good progress in facilitating the opening up of third-party data through initiatives such as the Bus Open Data Service (BODS), Street Manager, the development of the Rail Data Marketplace, and the modernisation of National Public Transport Access Nodes (NaPTAN). However, there is still much more to be achieved.

In developing this strategy, the department has undertaken a wide range of user research, including individual projects such as the Bus Open Data Service and the Local Transport Data Discovery (a comprehensive review of the local authority transport data landscape), and the work supporting the National Data Strategy. The department has also identified and peer reviewed – with an expert panel and range of stakeholders – actions which would address the barriers identified above.

Many of these actions are already underway (see Annex A) and have been grouped under five key themes. One of the challenges in working on improving data infrastructure is that it can be hard to explain the end benefit. Therefore, we have included a benefits summary and a theory of change which shows how these underpinning actions lead to the end outcomes of improving transport links, decarbonising transport and improving transport for the user. More detail on the themes and actions can be found further in the document, but a brief summary is below, followed by the benefits summary.

The strategy covers both reserved and devolved areas: where the strategy covers reserved areas (and, in respect of Northern Ireland, excepted areas), it does so for the whole of the UK, and where it covers devolved or transferred areas, it applies to England only.