Open and accountable?

02 March 2012

Buzz words of the moment. Slightly allied to the discussion above access to more data will also open up new products and applications to help passengers. We are doing our bit. While our rail National Passenger Survey and Bus Passenger Survey are both on our website, searching and using the data is only really for professionals. We are sitting on a goldmine of data that the industry makes good use of, but what we need to do is get more of it out into the wider public domain. For example, we collect and collate comments from passengers. These verbatim bites of information are very useful – Southern is currently trawling through them to get comments about the state of their loos. Thousands of these are posted up every year. Looking at what FixMyTransport.com are doing we are focusing at making this information more available, useful and powerful. Ultimately it will save the industry money – somewhere, someone else has probably already answered many of the questions the industry is spending a fortune providing bespoke answers to.