TransportAPI and COVID-19
Like so many other organisations around the World, we at TransportAPI have had our workloads radically reprioritised as a result of COVID-19.
We’ve temporarily paused many of the long-term projects we have been working on, and instead focussed on how we can provide the most accurate schedule and real time transport information we can, at a time when much of this information is unknowable.
Our normal workflow would be to ingest and merge schedule data from the most reliable sources available to us, run data quality checks, then push this out to our databases at the earliest opportunity.
Right now the most reliable schedule data isn’t in any machine-readable format – instead much of this takes the form of handwritten notes pinned to walls in the depots of the 100s of bus operators around the country.
We are working with transport operators to discuss how the bus schedules should adapt to accommodate this change in passenger demand and driver supply, and how we can restore a reliable digital representation of this as soon as possible.
We’re doing everything we can to represent the new normal as accurately as we can, as soon as we can.
