Https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/journey-planner-timetables.zip

Looking at “Our open data - Transport for London” there is a link to this…

https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/journey-planner-timetables.zip

but it states on the our-open-data page:

" The example feed below is not updated and for demonstration purposes only . You need to register to gain access to the live feeds."

I’ve logged in to the https://api-portal.tfl.gov.uk/ but there is no mention of journey-planner-timetables.zip anywhere inside that.

Is You need to [register to gain access to the live feeds] incorrect or is there a link inside api-portal.tfl.gov.uk that I can’t find?

Try https://tfl.gov.uk/tfl/syndication/feeds/journey-planner-timetables.zip

@mjcarchive

Thanks. I’m not sure how I was to deduce that from the documentation…

Brian

I suspect that the documentation has not been amended for ten years or more! It probably goes back to the early days of open data when there was a real debate about how useful it was for an organisation to know its customer base. For example, if someone asked me for a statistic, my first question was what are you trying to shed light upon, because often there was a better approach, the statistic wasn’t capable of answering the question or (remember some queries originated with ministers) it was the wrong question! That opportunity goes if the dataset is downloaded without interaction or registration. It quickly became clear that those disadvantages were outweighed by the advantages of “letting a thousand flowers bloom” in terms of reuse. (There are some stories that could be told about those early days…). There is some contact with users through fora such as this but no doubt there are other unknown users out there.

I can see no reason at all why any static dataset should require registration. The sort of stuff people do with the dynamic datasets such as Countdown is another matter as it has resource implications.

The xml files in this particular zip file are, I believe, to be updated to use a new version of TransXChange at some point. If this is going to affect the format or content of the files, It would be good to have confirmation that users will be able to see a test example in advance.

Michael

1 Like

I assume the TxC update will be from 2.1 to 2.4/5. The main change is the addition of accessibility information The 2.5 documentation describes.

Nick

The changes from 2.1 to 2.4 look to be more extensive than those between 2.4 and 2.5 but it is very hard to know whether these impact on what the user sees rather than on the way the frantic underwater paddling works! From memory, TransXChange also includes a lot of operational information that is irrelevant to Journey Planners so if those elements are changed, even radically, it won’t matter.

I’d just like to see a test file well in advance so I have time to make sensible amendments to coding rather than doing a bodge job (cries from off stage - all your jobs are bodge jobs…)

@mjcarchive

If you go to the TNDS download site, ftp.tnds.basemap.co.uk (requires registration at https://www.travelinedata.org.uk/traveline-open-data/traveline-national-dataset/ for user id/password) there is a folder TNDSV2.5 which contains the newer versions of the files. L.zip is the London set within that.
I don’t yet know to what extent the files have actually been upgraded with 2.5-specific data, but it should test/prove compatibility at the very least
For what it’s worth, I wrote my own code to the 2.5 standard, as it had already been published at that point, and it handles 2.1 files just fine.

@nickp
That’s encouraging as I have used that when the Datastore file is unavailable and I don’t think I had any problems. I suppose they might not have been on 2.5 last time I did that though. Not absolutely sure as sod’s law meant that the Datastore file became available towards the end of the work.

Just for info, I found that first Chrome and later Mozilla wouldn’t let me get at the data, direct ftp through the browser apparently raising security issues. I now get at it when required via Filezilla,.

Michael