Why (UK) train departure information is not open data.
placr.co.uk
placr.co.uk
The fact that a publicly-funded organisation refuse to allow access to data because they have been criticised is absolutely scandalous. They get our money for free then dare to get shirty about the people who are funding them?!!
The railway service in the UK is appallingly bad, the majority of the rest of Europe appear to have worked out how to actually make trains work, and yet they have the cheek to do this. Unbelievable.
I'd like to write an app that tracks lateness round the UK and name + shame operators who are doing poorly. I strongly suspect official results are somewhat skewed by averaging/etc., and by focusing on hotspots/representing the data differently you could get a more accurate picture. Doing so would be critical of the rail operators - would they refuse me a license? Would I have to pay for the privilege of determining how effectively my (+ the rest of the people of the UK's) money was being spent?
It's like handing over £50 to somebody and them charging you for the privilege.
£5bn a year and we still have to pay for tickets - must be nice to be in a business where you get money for free THEN GET TO CHARGE FOR YOUR SERVICE ON TOP OF IT.
Sorry, angry, but legitimately so I think.
Edit: I have yet to obtain a valid 2D ticket myself, but the promotional image released is at least similar to what the spec describes, and the pre-amble is a match.
"Release our data, or we'll release yours"
It is definitely super annoying that this data is not free, but the reality is that it does cost a bit of money to gather and aggregate.
Furthermore, though I frequently take the train, I do consider it unfair that general taxation revenues are used to fund the train services -- especially considering that if you look at the stats they are principally used by the wealthy. Charging for data goes some way to shifting the cost burden of rail back onto the rail travellers themselves, as the person ultimately paying for this data is the traveller that uses the train time app/website.
Gathering and aggregating I'm not sure about, but I think the bigger cost is probably the frequency and number of connections to the feeds, which doesn't need to be as costly as it is. Fourth paragraph is most relevant: http://www.lyonanderson.com/post/2670466085/youre-asking-for...
We might not all use the services, but we are all certainly entitled to investigate and examine how our money is being spent - standing in the way of providing data for what appear to be money-grabbing reasons certainly does not help redistribute the cost to rail users I don't think, and actively gets in the way of highlighting less effective rail operators.
There hasn't been any progress since I wrote that and it really does seem that NRE are using the overly broad code of practice as a way to punish those who question their attitudes.
Hardly a progressive way for a body that gets a large amount of public funding to behave.
http://ojp.nationalrail.co.uk/en/s/ldb/liveTrainsJson?depart...
.. which is, basically, open for everybody to use (in the sense that it requires no authentication). I use it myself to push live data to my mobile phone from my desktop PC.
One is the fundamental approach to maximising value from government-created works. Traditionally, the Crown owns the copyright and then sells them to maximise revenue. The US approach is to make it public domain.
The second issue is that the bar for a creative work covered by copyright is much lower in the UK than in the US. The notorious case is football schedules which are copyrighted, but it also applies to cinema and train times.
If you believe that the correct way to maximise value is to use the data commercially to maximise revenue then you won't see a problem with the current situation.
If you believe that the correct way to maximise value is to provide the data for free to end users then you'll think it's wrong.
The article implies the latter is true without argument, and implies it's the norm in the UK.
I think most people would agree that taxpayer value for public expenditure should be maximised, and were the money from the licences going directly into the public coffers then we could certainly have a discussion about whether taxpayer value is maximised by selling the data or giving it away for free.
That, however, is not what is happening here. As so frequently happens in the UK, the data is publically funded, and the profits are privately realised.
I agree that large-scale API provision is added value, and I have no objection to a private company making a profit from that. What I object to is a private company being handed a monopoly on that private data, with no effective oversight being given to the terms under which they provide access to it.
ATOC, by dint of the exclusive licence granted to them by Network Rail, have complete control of the market for this publically-funded data. They are adding value by serving it as a reliable API, certainly; however the price they are able to command has little relation to that value, because they have no competitors.
* sorry
Companies with a monopoly or companies that have a political purpose and is founded by the public would also be covered by the law of free access to databases.
The company responsible for departure information in Oslo was very early with open APIs and giving access to developers. Only clausal was that you couldn't use it for commercial work. A couple of months ago they also removed this clausal so now it's free, even for commercial usage. More info here: http://bit.ly/iq1pbT (google translate)
If the data was open, this process would become automated and cost the train companies lots of money.
... and it would therefore work, as presumably intended, as a meaningful incentive.
Whatever licences the Government gives rail-related bodies ought to make free public data access a requirement.
It only works for NXEA, but that's good enough for me!
But then I still don't understand why we, taxpayers, pay money to companies that pay out profits. Loans, fine, but why are we paying money that just leaks out in to shareholders bank accounts instead of being spent on transport and its infrastructure.
When I worked in the public sector the minimum wage came in and boosted a lot of the low grades pay levels. At the time this was said to be an embarrassment for the government as the minimum wage did little to similarly skilled workers outside of the public sector.
Indeed where I worked practically any of the staff could work for substantially more in an equivalent role in a private firm.
Teachers seem to get less money often in private sector, but benefits of shorter terms, better discipline, better working conditions and the like help considerably. Nurses in private employment seem to get quite a bit more.
What's equivalent to the police force?
Armed forces are supposedly poorly paid, but they get bed and board too.
>The report said the gap - or pay premium - between what a typical public sector worker earns above their equivalent in the private sector has increased to 16.5% over the past two years for salaried workers.
But it says this has risen by 35% for workers paid by the hour, despite efforts by the government to reduce the public sector wage bill.*
At the same time, real pay has fallen for the bottom 30% of private sector workers.
/ Is this a case of damn lies and statistics. If private sector pay falls then the gap widens, no? Is this article just about falling private sector pay due to recession?
In many cases the services that have recently been privatized were never nationalized to begin with - they were public services, like garbage collection or public transport, that have no obvious market competition model to follow.
Your definition of "rent-seeking" is also incorrect. Rent-seeking behaviour is when an economic agent attempts to manipulate public policy for private gain. A government body cannot engage in this behaviour by definition, as it does not take a profit, and is not private. It can fight its corner though - seeking more funding - but then it must spend that money on things like schoolbooks or hospital beds. This is considered a horrifying waste of resources to the private sector, which knows that those funds could better be spent on yachts and hookers.
My use of "rent seeking" is fine, there is other gain to extract than pure monetary profit. One is personal prestige: Being the boss of a big department with a big budget is nice (and well paid, even in the public sector).
An example of a public company, a railway one even, squandering billions on useless prestige projects: Danish State Railways procuring a small run of entirely custom made intercity trains instead of getting something off the shelf. It's a 5 billion DKK project, close to a decade late now. Also, changing governments failed to maintain the signals, so they're utterly rotten, causing delays daily.
Why that is the case is the real question.
Surely the (presumably small amount of) money they raise from api subscriptions and app sales (minus the development cost) would be hugely outweighed by the increase in ticket sales + reduced dev cost from making the data accessible.
- its own, dysfunctional keyboard - because Android's keyboard was just too, er, fast. And didn't have a bright green tick button.
- an occasional feature, where after entering a timetable query a progress bar appears, and the app commands you to "Tap the screen" to make the bar advance. Once you have danced like a monkey for them, the app finally allows you to see the result of your query.
- no information about trains that depart in less than five minutes, or have already departed. Because why would you ever want to know about the train you're already on?
It really is a masterful satire of everything a corporate, money-grubbing app commissioned by sociopaths and authored by embittered misanthropes would be - an app that simply hates its users.
1. Is data copyrightable, patentable or a trade secret? If not, follow the next steps.
2. Contact as much open-minded licensees as possible and persuade them to leak the data.
3. Build a service to collect the leaked data, collide several samples from varying origins to remove any "watermarks" (and constantly monitor for them), and publish it.
4. If the condition (1) stands true, the leak service should be legal (IMNAL), and service provider can't be obliged to say who's leaking the data.
5. ...
6. PROFIT^W PROTEST!
Childish, and somehow risky (the (2) is tricky), but given enough power, the information could be made public.
If the departure times are copyrightable — there's something really wrong with copyright system.
It could be copyright and trade secret however the important IPR to consider here is database rights.
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-otherprotect/c-databaseri... http://www.out-law.com/page-5698
I live in Taipei where the transport company holds back similar data for bus and subway. It's a bureaucratic nightmare and also public/private confusion just like in this post.