Bus fleet information

Does anyone know when this data will be updated for March 2019:

Hi @mulder Thanks for flagging this. I’ve asked our colleagues in Buses to check if the new data is available. I’ll let you know when it’s updated.

Thank you - looking forward to the update :slight_smile:

Hi @mulder Just heard back from the team now responsible for publishing this audit data. Unfortunately there is a delay to publishing the March data which is now set to be available in July. Please check the website again in July. I’ll also ask my colleagues in Buses to let me know when it’s available and post up here. Thanks for your patience!

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will it be published as a spreadsheet? In 2017 it was, but now seems to be only as a pdf

Could they fix the text descriptions for the first two links on Bus fleet data & audits - Transport for London - “Bus fleet audit 31 March 2018”
(https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/fleet-audit-report-31-march-2019.pdf) is actually 2019 and “Fleet online operational vehicle data - 31 March 2018” (https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/fleet-list-annual-audit-report-31-march-2019.pdf) is also for 2019.

TIA

Simon

Just noticed from the latest post that it is in fact 2019 data published now, but as pointed out, it is now only a PDF - are we going to get a spreadsheet, not sure how anyone expects a massive spreadsheet in PDF format to be used or consumed.

it is a text searchable pdf so the text can be extracted with OCR

after a grep and awk I get 9142 rows and the fixed length field import wizard in Excel does a reasonable job (well the columns I want anyway)

That’s not really the point. Open data is supposed to be about making data more accessible and reusable, not less. Moving from Excel to PDF, whether or not searchable, is a retrograde step. Where a source contains properly organised data, there is no reason not to make it available as Excel, CSV or whatever.

Th worry of coursed is that if moving to PDF is accepted it provides a precedent to do he same for other sources. It needs to be queried each and every time it happens.

aye, but in the mean time, I want to use the data - and this is a Tech forum

Fair point and I’ve done plenty of mass translation of PDFs in my time. Surprised myself sometimes with just what could be done really.

The Tech Forum is partly here to work around problems like this but it seems to me legit to point out that the change of format has actually created new problems. The TfL staff on this forum are the people best placed to remind other parts of the business that data are meant to be becoming more open, not less!

@mjarchive I’ll make the data owners aware of your comments. I agree a PDF is not the format we’d normally select for open data.