Digital news from Transport for London
Further to the Shakespeare Review which used TfL’s open data activity as a case study in 2013, we asked Deloitte to carry out a more comprehensive study on the value of open data to our customers, users and London overall.
There are more than 600 apps powered by TfL’s open data, and these are used by as much as 42% of Londoners.
The Blackwall Tunnel (A102) is one of the busiest places on London’s road network. In recent years, journey times have increased and drivers can expect delays to their journey at some times of day. We’ve released this data to the open data community, to enable developers to build the information into their products.
Our data shows the busiest times at Blackwall Tunnel so developers can include this information in journey-planning apps
*Follow this link to find the data.
1) The busiest time in the northbound tunnel on a weekday is from 07:00 – 07:30. In heavy traffic conditions, drivers’ journeys could be 15 minutes quicker if they travelled between 06.30-07.00 instead of 07:00 – 07:30.
2) The busiest time in the northbound tunnel on a weekend is from 13.30 – 15.00. In heavy traffic conditions, drivers’ journeys could be 15 minutes quicker if they travelled between 12.00-13.00 instead of 13.30- 15.00.
We have made this data available to the open data community so you can use it to create products which display the busiest times at the tunnel, allowing drivers to choose to travel outside of these periods or create products for planning quicker and more reliable journeys.
We encourage the community to provide feedback on our new data sets to help us continue to enhance and improve our open data products. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section below or on our tech forum.
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.
The City of London will be carrying out essential maintenance on Tower Bridge. Full details of the closure are in our data set.
Chirdeep Chhabra from Digital Catapult gives an update on the Transport and Mobility Challenge, including an extended deadline for those taking part.
Rikesh Shah, Lead Relationship Manager at TfL, helps launch the Transport and Mobility challenge in April
As previously posted on this blog, London Data City | Data Nation was launched on 12 April, with a series of 6 month-long challenges being undertaken by teams in London and Singapore.
The first in the series of challenges is the Transport and Mobility challenge, which is now underway and runs until Monday 16 May.
At the launch event for the challenge Rikesh Shah, Lead Digital Relationship Manager at TfL, introduced our open data policy and set the scene for the challenge. Following up on the launch event, Rikesh has a message for the participants with some handy extra info:
Dear all,
I hope you’re all enjoying the challenge.
At the launch of the Data Nation challenge I promised that I would provide more information about TfL, with a particular focus on customer insight. So, I am delighted to provide a link to some useful information.
In particular, have a look at Chapter 7 which focuses on Customer Experience.
http://content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-london-report-8.pdfGood luck!
All the best,
Rikesh Shah,
Transport for London
The London Data City | Data Nation challenge was launched on the morning of Tuesday 12 April at an event hosted by Digital Catapult. The launch event outlined the context and details of the 6 month-long challenge being undertaken by teams in London and Singapore, starting with the Transport and Mobility challenge that runs until Monday 16 May.
In partnership with TfL, the Greater London Authority and Ford, Digital Catapult are setting challenges based around 2 key questions:
Public Transport Challenge
How can we accurately identify, filter and characterise transportation delay events across large-scale, dynamic, multi-modal transportation systems?
Enabling users to make seamless progress towards their destination. People need help to very quickly identify breaks in the system and need greater help for decision making in case the system breaks and when to abandon their plans for a better option. Participants need to choose data sources (from sandbox or beyond) to achieve the end goal.
Road Network Challenge
How can we enhance customer service and experience across London’s road network?
Through Data City | Data Nation we intend to deliver new technology solutions that help understand and predict events on London’s road network and go about enhancing the overall customer experience whilst travelling that network. TfL will provide SCOOT traffic data (described in more detail here) to participants of the challenge that is not yet publicly available.
We’ll update this blog as key milestones in the challenge are met, and will of course announce the winners in May. Good luck to all taking part!
There were many expert speakers setting the context and details of the challenge, and their presentations are summarised below.
Rikesh Shah, Lead Relationship Manager at TfL, introduced our open data policy and what data would be released for the challenge
Introduction – Chirdeep Chhabra, Digital Catapult
As previously outlined in our post on March 30 on this blog, the Traffic Data Hack Day was hosted by Amazon Web Services on April 6. The event was attended by TfL employees, academics working within this subject area, data scientists, transport app developers and data visualisation developers.
Another key event in our engagement with those working with our open data, the day was split into two areas, with one focussed on visualising TfL data and the other on extracting data from the source and providing it for analysis.
I’ve not attended a hackathon or hack day before, so it was really interesting to see how they work and to meet participants from all sorts of backgrounds, including universities, consultancies, government agencies and other parts of TfL.
At the beginning of the day we split the focus into two areas; ‘EMR (Elastic Map Reduce)’ where the group was looking at ways to improve the feed of, access to and processing of the SCOOT data and ‘Redshift’ where the group made use of data that had been uploaded to the system and was ready to analyse.
A team working on ‘Redshift’ which made use of data that had been uploaded to the system and was ready to analyse.
Join us for the launch of the London Data City | Data Nation transport and mobility challenge on Tuesday 12 April. Hosted by Digital Catapult, this event will set the scene for the challenge with industry stakeholders and keynote speakers alongside leading transport organisations.
TfL have agreed the challenges with Ford, the other partner for this event, and we’ll also be providing expert speakers and judges and offering technical support to the participants. We’ll be providing open data from our Unified API as well as the historic Traffic Data Enquiry System (TDES) data generated by SCOOT traffic sensors across London (which detect traffic flows at junctions and then optimise traffic signals every second to help keep vehicles moving).
Our TDES data hasn’t been made publicly available yet, so we’re hoping to see some great innovative solutions to some of the key transport and mobility challenges, from participants both in London and Singapore.
This event is another example of our continuing commitment to open data with over 8,000 registered users, as well as our determination to open up our data and support the developer community as much as possible to help create great products and solutions that help London keep working and growing, and make life in the city better.
Venue: Digital Catapult Centre
101 Euston Road, London, NW1 2RA
View on Google Maps
12 April 2016 09:00 – 12:00
You can register for the event here
We’ll be making our Traffic Data Enquiry System data available to the participants of the challenge
**Registration for this event is now closed**
TfL’s Urban Traffic Control System (UTC) uses 12,000 sensors located at junctions across the Capital to measure traffic flow. The data produced is used to drive SCOOT – the traffic light optimiser system – and on Wednesday 6 April we’re aiming to generate greater value from this as-yet untapped data source.
We want to configure a data processing engine for UTC data and begin exploring this large data set using the tools business users are familiar with, such as R Studio and Tableau, as well as event streams, map reduce type platforms and machine learning tools.
The event is part of our ongoing drive to work with the dev community to create great products from our open data, and offers an opportunity to learn and experiment with cloud tools in a safe, sandbox type environment. Experts from TfL’s Road Space Management team will be on hand to provide support.
Venue: Amazon Development Centre, Leadenhall Court, One Leadenhall Street, London, EC3V 1PP
6 April 2016 09:00 – 17:00
Lunch will be provided, so please let us know any dietary requirements.
Please confirm your attendance by Tuesday 5th April – you can register for the event here: http://www.cvent.com/d/4fqcf4
Amazon are hosting the Traffic Data Hack Day on April 6 at the Amazon Development Centre in Leadenhall Street, London
As part of a wider road safety strategy, last week we launched the London Collision Map and London collision data on our website and in our API, as part of our ongoing commitment to providing open data. We’ve also made improvements to cycle journey planning.
The new cycle journey planning features include:
The other new feature, the London Collision Map, allows searches for road collisions across London, providing information about when and where they occurred, as well as the severity of the incidents, dating back to 2005. It uses STATS-19 casualty dataset, collected annually by the Department for Transport, and shows a significant reduction in the number of collisions over time.
Through this data we’re able to inform people about junctions and roads that have high numbers of collisions, and where road users should be particularly careful. The 2014 figures show that this number fell to its lowest level since records began, in line with the Mayor’s target to halve the number of people killed and seriously injured (KSI’s) by 2020.
The London Collision Map, showing fatal and serious collisions in 2014, around the area of St. James’s Park Underground station.
