12 Mar 2026 by Jonathan Raper
TransportAPI are delighted to announce that South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) have added the new TAPI Bus Disruptions managed service to their Travel South Yorkshire platform. Bus disruption messages are generated by operators and local authorities to alert travellers to short-term changes to bus services in participating regions.
Bus disruptions are an important piece of the data puzzle when building a comprehensive bus information service as they give details of exceptional events affecting the network. On the day we are putting this blog post together we picked out one particular disruption to show the difference that TAPI Bus Disruptions can make.
In this case heavy traffic has led FirstBus to divert buses away from a congested loop passing the Sheffield Grand Mosque on Botham Street in Grimesthorpe served by the 18/18a service. This diversion is only effective in the evening during the month of Ramadan as the notification on the Travel South Yorkshire website shows. However, the TAPI Bus Disruptions gives access to the full Disruption message for use by developers as shown below. This means that full details of the disruption can be retrieved including the affected period including services and stops affected.
Since TransportAPI offers hypermedia links in endpoint responses that link to all other relevant endpoints, this means that the response includes pointers to disruption details and journey patterns, schedules, bus route geometry, live bus departures and bus tracking, all of which can be found in TAPI Bus Information managed service. The bus service timetables endpoint with the live option in TAPI Bus Information managed service shows the movement of vehicles on the actual route. FirstBus use this endpoint to show the actual live position of the bus along the normal route in the FirstBus app.
During the period of the disruption the FirstBus app shows that buses take the diversion specified in the TAPI Bus Diversions response ‘advice- details' section: ‘Services 18 and 18a to divert directly along Upwell Street in both directions’. Following buses moving during the validity period of the disruption in the FirstBus app on the evening of writing this blog, it can be seen that the bus indeed follows Upwell Street and cuts off the loop as indicated.
The new TAPI Bus Disruptions managed service now gives access to accurate and up-to-date details of disruptions for all the participating local authorities. Developers can now choose the enrich their services with full details of disruptions so that users always have the full information picture.