Guidance

The Bus services around the Christmas and New Year period will often operate differently to normal weeks. 

The data for use in services such as the Department for Transport Bus Open Data Service , Traveline, journey planners, real time systems and mobile phone apps all need to be updated to reflect the changed operation. 

This advice deals with how to prepare data for the BODS and other systems to ensure that it is correct for the Christmas and New Year 2025-26 holiday period. 

People use Real Time Information (RTI) for planning and making journeys across the various modes of transport available to them.
RTI has largely replaced the printed timetable as the key source of information on what journeys, routes and times for travel are possible in order to make a journey.

This has been made possible by the:

Auracast Bluetooth is a new wireless audio broadcasting technology that extends the capabilities of Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio. It allows a single audio source to broadcast to an unlimited number of nearby Bluetooth receivers, making it ideal for public announcements, assistive listening, and social audio sharing.

This briefing note introduces the technology and outlines some of its potential uses.

https://www.rtig.org.uk/documents/rtigt061-1

With the near ubiquitous provision of location data for the bus fleet in the UK within reach, it is timely to consider why different information may be presented to the passenger on different outputs.

This report sets out to address this gap in understanding.

Following a workshop earlier in January this document has been produced to help understand how customer information systems can better be managed during the current driver shortage. 
This document identifies a number of actions that may help the industry longer term with managing high volumes of short notice changes and cancellations.