Archived: Tower Bridge Closure – Data Set Released

The City of London Corporation are planning essential major maintenance works to Tower Bridge. The work will require a full closure of the bridge to all vehicle and cyclist traffic for three months. The closure will be in place 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from Saturday 1 October to Friday 30 December 2016.

As part of our open data policy, we’re releasing a full data set of the closure to allow developers to easily incorporate this data into their apps, helping Londoners to plan their journeys while the works are ongoing.

Tower Bridge Road Closures Map
The City of London will be carrying out essential maintenance on Tower Bridge. Full details of the closure are in our data set.

What have we done?

To allow third parties to understand the extent, scope and timing of these road closures, we’ve created a data set of all the road closures that will be in place for the duration of the Tower Bridge closure. This has been created using an industry data exchange standard called DATEX II.

We released a similar data set for the London Marathon this year, and details of the release were in this blog post.

What is DATEX?

DATEX II is a multi-part Standard, maintained by CEN Technical Committee 278, CEN/TC278, (Road Transport and Traffic Telematics), see www.itsstandards.eu.

DATEX is a standardised way of communicating and exchanging traffic information between traffic centres, service providers, traffic operators and media partners. The specification provides a harmonised way of exchanging data across boundaries, at a system level, to enable better management of the road network.

See http://www.datex2.eu for more information on the standard.

Why have we done it?

A standard way of publishing road information may benefit organisations who are already consuming data from other organisations provided in the same way.

What data is included?

The data describes all closures associated with the Tower Bridge works. The data provides information on the location, direction and period of the closure.

Where can you access the data?

The Tower Bridge road closures data set is open access, and can be accessed at:

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/roads.data.tfl.gov.uk/datex2/TowerBridgeClosureData_19082016.xml

Feedback

We would love to hear what you think of this data; what does and doesn’t work for you, how we could improve similar offerings in future, and so on. Please leave us a comment below to let us know your thoughts.

7 Comments

  1. The concept and content of this blogpage is good. I hope similar pages will be posted for future road closures. A quick line to let people know that pedestrians can still cross during these works could be on this page.
    Thanks for the links and reblogging button, it means tha we bloggers can disseminate the information faster.
    Regards
    Mark Mapstone (aka Mr Bloggy)

    1. Thanks for your comments Mark, and thanks for reblogging. We’ll definitely be posting similar pieces as and when we release datasets around other closures / events.

  2. Looks good.
    But why are tfl so slow to update your own website with changes that tfl have initiated?
    Two weekends ago, bus routes 135/277/D3 were re routed – a tfl initiative. But two weeks on, the tfl web site has the old maps, the old timetables, and Ibus doesn’t recognise these buses in their “new route” sections of route. Looks and feels sloppy….

  3. Tower bridge closure will cause havoc tfl have a diversion in place over London Bridge where there are long term roadworks north side so three lanes into one Southwark bridge has no access from the west rotherhithe tunnel is held up by traffic lights at lime house are the people making these bizarre decisions effected ? Tfl have shot themselves in the foot as regards buses to much emphasis has been put on cyclist narrowing roads bike superhighways (empty after rush hour )so the buses are gridlocked

    1. Hi Perry, and thanks for your comment. We understand your frustrations but just to make it clear, the Tower Bridge works are City of London works, not TfL works and we are doing what we can (including releasing this data) in order to help people as much as possible during the disruption.

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