Calculating UK Rail Fares (using fares data)

[yorkie]

I was reading this blog post and I thought it may be of interest to some on here:
http://ljn.io/posts/calculating-uk-rail-fares/

Although the UK rail fare data is often described as “open” I would actually describe it as available rather than open. Rail Delivery Group (formerly ATOC) are the holders of the data and before handing it over you need to agree to a fairly restrictive license and sign up for an account that can be disabled at their discretion. On top of that the data is only updated three times a year whereas the commercial data is updated daily.

What’s worse is that the data is almost entirely meaningless to anyone not working in the industry. Using the data to calculate rail fares is a complicated process and there is no formal documentation public or private. This guide covers the basics of looking up a fare and working out how much a train ticket should cost. The information presented in this blog post is also available in a wiki...

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http://ljn.io/posts/check-a-journey-is-valid-on-a-fare/

In my previous post we covered the steps needed to calculate a fare. Now we’re going to validate that a journey is permitted using a fare. The data we need for that is all in the fares feed and as part of that we will be covering the fares restriction data which is a notoriously obtuse set of data......

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If anyone else here has also been looking at the fares data, do you share these frustrations?

Does anyone have any thoughts on how the data could be clearer?

One concern I have is that some of the data is simply wrong, and contradicts the public-facing conditions and/or restrictions.

 

[linusnorton]

Hi,

Essentially my frustrations were the nature of the license for the data, the fact that the data differs to the paid for data and that there is no documentation on correct usage.

Perhaps my issue with the license is unwarranted. It appears to be licensed using the Creative Commons license and all they request is attribution (BY). I don't like that you have to sign up to get the data and in doing so tell them exactly what you are going to do with it. In theory if they don't like what you are doing they can take away your access.

With the data quality - as the open data only contains the full refreshes many of the files are empty. I am led to believe that this will change in the near future.

Regarding documentation, well I decided to take matters into my own hands there and at least attempt to write something up.

I can accept that the data will always contain flaws but it is frustrating that the people putting data into the system don't seem to understand it's constraints. The example I like to use is the Weekender tickets which are only valid out on a Friday. The data allows you to specific a return day but not an outward one. If they really, really need to retail that type of ticket they should at least encourage RDG to invest in the system and change it.

I know there is a massive fear of change due to so many legacy TOMs and TVMs being in operation but living in eternal fear will mean the industry never moves forward.

Another observation, in the both the fares and national routeing guide is that this stuff was all designed in the 90s. What I can only assume is an attempt to reduce the size of the datasets means that everything is turned into business logic and rules (undocumented) when it could just be provided as data. This is particularly true of the national routeing guide, which I think everyone can agree is completely insane.

I will get off my soapbox now.