Trivia: Bus stops with incorrect ATCO and NAPTAN bus stop codes.

[stadler]

Falmer has two bus stops which have both oddly been given incorrect ATCO and NAPTAN codes.

Science Park Road on Eastern Ring Road
(brimjpg) (149000006073)
Served By Night N25

Science Park Road on Southern Ring Road
(bripdta) (149000009023)
Served By Day 25

These two bus stop have BHCC (Brighton Hove City Council) codes. But these two bus stop both fall within the ESCC (East Sussex County Council) area. So they should have been given ESCC codes. All of the other nearby stops in Falmer have the correct codes for the council in which they are in. It is just these odd two. I guess whoever made up the ATCO and NAPTAN codes did not look at the map properly to check where the border actually is.

• ATCO Stop Codes - Association Of Transport Coordinating Officers

• NAPTAN Stop Codes - National Public Transport Access Nodes

I am curious if anyone is aware of any other bus stops with incorrect ATCO and NAPTAN codes.

 

[ACBest]

Local authorities are responsible for their own NaPTAN data including ATCO codes, so it’ll likely be intentional that BHCC have taken on responsibility for the stops rather than ESCC - this isn’t unusual, and happens quite frequently at boundaries between two local authorities.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a stop located in Central Bedfordshire for which Hertfordshire take responsibility, including the placement of a flag and roadside publicity, and I can also think of a stop located in Rutland which is in Lincolnshire’s NaPTAN database, but has a Rutland flag and timetable publicity.

Edit - As well as the above, I’ve just remembered that some local authorities also look after NaPTAN data for other local authorities (for example Leicestershire also look after Leicester City and Rutland) - perhaps that’s the case here, but I don’t know, as it’s not local to me!

 

[duncombec]

Local authorities are responsible for their own NaPTAN data including ATCO codes, so it’ll likely be intentional that BHCC have taken on responsibility for the stops rather than ESCC - this isn’t unusual, and happens quite frequently at boundaries between two local authorities.

I believe there are some similar cases on the East Sussex/Kent border in Groombridge, where bus stops are in East Sussex, but have Kent flags, yet in turn have East Sussex QR codes attached.

Ultimately, I suspect the OP's example isn't "wrong" but deliberate, and equally that there will be very few here who have paid enough attention to, or have time/ability/inclination to search the data, to get many further examples.

 

[stadler]

Just found another two bus stops in the Copthorne area that also have codes that do not align with the area that they are in.

These two bus stops are both physically in the West Sussex County Council area but yet they have Surrey County Council codes.

Domewood (E Bound)
(surgtmpd) (40004412032B)

Domewood (W Bound)
(surgtmpa) (40004412032A)

I wonder why a neighbouring local authority would want to manage bus stops that are not in their area. Maybe the other council pays them. But i can not see why because the stops are not very far from other stops that either council manages so it would be very easy for the correct council to manage these stops.

 

[Roger1973]

I'm a bit late to this, but a few disconnected thoughts.

Yes, some authorities (and some external contractors) look after other authorities' data on an agency basis, but should use the correct local authority's codes for each of their own / their 'client' council/s.

Some councils (especially the smallest ones) don't want to have to pay for the software to do it. When NAPTAN started, you could upload it to the central data set in Excel (or csv) format and you can't now. Doing that was cheap but potentially fragile.

Following 'austerity', some councils don't really have any public transport staff (or didn't before BSIP funding came along) and I'm aware of some bus operators having difficulty getting NAPTAN numbers out of councils for new stops.

It is possible that mistakes were made on the fringes of council areas when it all started (about 25 years ago now) - some councils contracted out the initial survey to casual staff or a contractor, and it's possible that local knowledge and accuracy was lacking in some cases. Some councils took the task seriously as an important part of providing quality information (the idea of it feeding real time data and many people having apps on a device that does GPS location was probably less of a concern then. I remember going out surveying bus stops with a rucksack full of electronics to plot the locations for my then council, which was probably less accurate than what a basic smartphone can do now. And it didn't work at all in the 'ground floor of a shopping centre' type bus station!) Some saw it as a 'burden' placed upon them by central government and did it reluctantly and as cheaply as possible.

The guidance at the time also included the concept of having a 'pair' or 'cluster' of stops - there are locations where each stop in a pair (sometimes the stops on opposite sides of the road) are in different authorities. Some authorities took the administrative location as the highest priority, so you get the bus stop on one side of the road with one locality and stop name, the opposite stop can have a different locality and stop name. Other councils talked to each other and agreed that council A would own this pair of stops, council B that pair (or something like that.) There must be places with a 3 or 4 way boundary and bus stops round a crossroads in different local authority areas.

In some cases, it may be that a bus route that is almost entirely in authority area A ventures across a boundary for one stop, and all concerned agreed that council A would take ownership of physical infrastructure and / or NAPTAN at that one stop.

Administrative boundaries can move slightly for one reason or another - it's not unknown for one property to be split between two local authorities (one of the schools i went to, a borough boundary ran through the middle of the site, but it's now wholly in one London borough - I presume it didn't matter when ILEA was still a thing) but these have tended to be 'tidied up' in recent years, it must make rates / council tax complicated for a start.

Alternatively, it's not unknown for a bus stop to get moved slightly for one reason or another (e.g minor road layout change, new lamp posts) and a few stops could have moved in to a different council's area and nobody has noticed - councils don't have the resources to go out and re-survey, and in some areas, ownership / maintenance of bus stop infrastructure is with bus operators not councils. (In Berkshire, there were a few bus stops still showing Tillingbourne ownership and timetables until only a few years ago, on a section of route that wasn't reinstated after Tillingbourne ceased trading in 2001 - I think they have either been taken down, fallen down or been lost in the undergrowth by now.)

Then there are the local government reorganisations which have split or combined existing transport authorities, and it's again not impossible that some mistakes have happened in re-allocating bus stops at this stage.

I'm not sure if there is a process for 'moving' an individual bus stop or two from one authority's data set to another - in theory council A could set up 'new' stops at a location and council B could make the same stops 'deleted' in their own data, and get the bus operators to change the stop number they use in systems at an agreed time.

(And yes, I have been involved in this in one way or another for much of the last 25 years, I'd sooner not say where, though...)

 

[markymark2000]

Some councils (especially the smallest ones) don't want to have to pay for the software to do it.

I understand what you have said for previous times (even if I disagree with it in principal), but since late 2020/early 2021, maintaining Naptan has become a statutory obligation in England (same as social care and home to school transport for eligible students etc) and due to become a statutory obligation in Scotland in the next few years. As such, authorities should be going through Naptan a lot more than they are doing, and fixing issues a LOT quicker and with a lot less quibble.

(for the record before someone jumps on this as they undoubtedly will, mistakes happen. I get that, we all do. It's how you respond when you are made aware of the mistakes. A few authorities that I and others have reported things back to have fix the issues within the day. Other authorities are refusing to fix them and passing the blame onto bus operators. Huge difference between the two different ways of responding).

 

[Roger1973]

I understand what you have said for previous times (even if I disagree with it in principal), but since late 2020/early 2021, maintaining Naptan has become a statutory obligation in England (same as social care and home to school transport for eligible students etc) and due to become a statutory obligation in Scotland in the next few years. As such, authorities should be going through Naptan a lot more than they are doing, and fixing issues a LOT quicker and with a lot less quibble.

I wasn't aware it was a 'statutory duty' as such, just an expectation. Wonder what sanctions there are against an authority that fails / refuses to do it? Suppose it could be an obstacle to further government funding streams like Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP).

I'd have thought that with BSIP funding, almost every authority has some public transport function / staffing now - although aware that many authorities have found it hard to recruit additional staff in the BSIP era - many of the local authority public transport people who were made redundant in the post-2010 austerity era have either reached retirement age, found jobs elsewhere either in or out of local authority public transport (I count myself in that number) so the number of experienced people available and willing to take on fixed term contracts (because of the short term funding) has been quite limited. I'm aware of a few authorities who tried and failed to recruit new / additional temporary staff when BSIP got going.

 

[markymark2000]

I wasn't aware it was a 'statutory duty' as such, just an expectation.

It came in specifically as part of the Bus Open Data regulations.

 

[Man of Kent]

I understand what you have said for previous times (even if I disagree with it in principal), but since late 2020/early 2021, maintaining Naptan has become a statutory obligation in England (same as social care and home to school transport for eligible students etc) and due to become a statutory obligation in Scotland in the next few years. As such, authorities should be going through Naptan a lot more than they are doing, and fixing issues a LOT quicker and with a lot less quibble.

I wasn't aware it was a 'statutory duty' as such, just an expectation. Wonder what sanctions there are against an authority that fails / refuses to do it?

I'm not convinced it is a statutory duty either, and cannot recall anything from the trade press or trade associations that highlighted it as such. The relevant legislation appears to be Section 18 of the Bus Services Act 2017, which specifies that the Secretary of State "may" make regulations to implement the provisions therein; however, no such secondary legislation seems to have been passed to enact such a duty.

 

[markymark2000]

I'm not convinced it is a statutory duty either, and cannot recall anything from the trade press or trade associations that highlighted it as such. The relevant legislation appears to be Section 18 of the Bus Services Act 2017, which specifies that the Secretary of State "may" make regulations to implement the provisions therein; however, no such secondary legislation seems to have been passed to enact such a duty.

The Public Service Vehicles (Open Data) (England) Regulations 2020 is when it came into place.

The Public Service Vehicles (Open Data) (England) Regulations 2020

These Regulations make provision to allow for the development of bus information applications or “Apps” for use on, for example, mobile telephones and other mobile devices in order to help passengers make informed decisions about their journeys. This is achieved by requiring bus operators...

www.legislation.gov.uk

Information about stopping places and changes to stopping places
15.—(1) A local transport authority must provide the Secretary of State’s National Public Transport Access Nodes database with the following information in electronic form in relation to each stopping place in its area—

(a)the location;
(b)the stop code(25) or the nodes code taken from the Secretary of State’s National Public Transport Access Nodes database;
(c)the area code;
(d)the Ordnance Survey grid reference;
(e)relevant landmarks;
(f)a topographic reference taken from the National Public Transport Gazetteer;
(g)details of any change in the location.

(2) The provision of information under paragraph (1) must commence by 31st December 2020.

Bus open data implementation guide

www.gov.uk

LTAs will have a statutory duty to ensure that the NaPTAN data is accurate and up-to-date for their local area. The Public Service Vehicle Open Data Regulations will mandate this data to be provided by 31 December 2020.