Better Data for Better Journeys

It’s good to see Elydium featured in Coach & Bus Week. The article runs across pages 24 to 26 of issue 1743, and is trailed on the front cover as “Does your data work?”.

Jonathan Welch spoke to Rob West and John Whitfield about where the industry’s data trouble actually starts. Operators and authorities have moved away from monolithic systems towards best-of-breed tools for scheduling, ticketing, AVL, journey planning and reporting — but two systems can both be compliant with the same standard and still not talk to each other, because the standards are broad enough to leave room for it. Compliance is not the same thing as interoperability.

Behind a good many of the resulting headaches sits one root cause: timetable version control.

The timetable is our bible — it dictates everything that happens across an operation. If the timetable is wrong, everything downstream breaks.

John Whitfield, Elydium

A scheduler ends up producing several versions of the same file for different downstream systems, each validated on its own. One mismatch, and the error propagates across the network without anyone noticing, because every file passed its own check. The article covers the case for one authoritative version feeding BODS, Traveline, ticket machines and RTPI alike — and a note of caution on AI, which produces plausible-looking output that needs real domain knowledge supervising it.

If it prompts a question about your own data, we would be glad to hear it. You can get in touch with us at hello@elydium.co.uk.