Transport User Voice – December – Transport Focus Data Hub

29 November 2018

On 7 November, alongside the results from our Strategic Roads User Survey, Transport Focus launched its new data hub. Staff were on hand at the Highways UK conference to provide live demonstrations of how to use the data hub. Demand for these demonstrations proved high, providing insight to people from a wide range of organisations, including Highways England, the Department for Transport, Costain, Tarmac and A-One.

A commitment to open data
Towards the end of 2017, Transport Focus reviewed how it could make data from its regular surveys more readily available to the travelling public and the transport industry, a process often referred to as providing ‘open data’. Transport Focus has had solutions in place for this using various different formats over the past few years, but it was clear that arrangements could be improved by having a single online venue to hold data from all the major Transport Focus tracker surveys in one place. From this initial idea, the concept of the Transport Focus Data Hub was developed.

How the data hub can help you
The hub sets out to give anybody, but particularly road users and passengers, transport operators and infrastructure providers, as well as those who specify and fund transport, easy access to what users think of services provided to them. It currently provides access to first findings from the new Strategic Roads User Survey (SRUS) and gives access to data collected since 2014 through the annual Bus Passenger Survey. Over the course of the next year, the data sets from several other key surveys will be added. In time, the hub will support and enable the comparison of satisfaction data for one, some or all modes of transport within a geographic area.

In line with the principles of open data, it is intended that insight professionals within the transport sector or elsewhere can self-interrogate Transport Focus’s data. Likewise, service managers, transport users and other interested stakeholders can find an easy-to-consume picture of satisfaction by mode and across modes in areas relevant to their own work and in ways that can help them focus on better meeting the needs of their users.

If you would like to understand more about the data available on the Transport Focus Data Hub, please get in touch.

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