Following our announcement at Transport Ticketing Global 2026 that TransportAPI would become the NextBuses operations and commercial provider under an agreement with Traveline, we are happy to report that the service has been migrated on time and as specified. ‘NextBuses - powered by TransportAPI’ is now part of our managed service lineup, available separately or as part of our Bus Information managed service.
NextBuses - powered by TransportAPI is now the single national service for real time information (RTI) on bus departures, bringing together all of the regional and local schemes in a single place. The service is regulated by Traveline on price, data quality and support and is available to all users with full IPR ownership in the data downstream. Users can access the service for free to evaluate the data, and plans are available from dozens of requests to millions of requests at scale.
The new NextBuses - powered by TransportAPI service offers data in BS EN 15531 Service Interface for Real-Time Information (SIRI) Stop Monitoring (SM) form using a POST request and it returns XML data. However, for those users who wish to access the data with lower overheads using a GET request, the new RTI data is also available within the TransportAPI Bus information managed service, with the response being in JSON form with hyperlinks to other TransportAPI resources on stops, routes, schedules and disruption.
At the same time as TransportAPI became the NextBuses provider, Traveline commissioned us to migrate the SMS RTI service available from bus stops. Although the service is no longer the main method of access to bus RTI, it still serves a socially necessary function and some local authorities provide access to this service for free. We are delighted to report that this service was also migrated at the same time and now produces results based on the same TransportAPI managed services.
In addition to the migration of the service, TransportAPI has also extended the coverage of NextBuses working closely with Traveline, and the NextBuses - powered by TransportAPI service now covers London, Manchester and Edinburgh filling in some previous gaps in the national coverage.
Access to the free tier of NextBuses - powered by TransportAPI service is available by signing up at https://developer.transportapi.com/ - no payment is required unless you wish to use more than the free allowance of 30 requests per day. If you wish to embed the data in any kind of service above the free level you can register a payment method and begin using the data immediately on our eCommerce portal powered by Stripe.
We would like to thank all of the local authorities and service providers across the country for facilitating the migration to the new service. We have worked closely with Traveline and NextBuses users during the migration, and we are now happy to see that users have moved seamlessly across to the new platform. We are happy to respond to queries about the new service through support@transportapi.com, and we look forward to working across the nation to deliver this data wherever it needs to be delivered to travellers.