A Government official responsible for overseeing bus services throughout their respective regions. They have the power to summon and discipline bus service providers whom they deem to be providing an inadequate service, especially where services run unreasonably poorly and/or are changed without permission. In exceptional circumstances, they can withdraw operators^ licences to provide services.

A point on any bus service, usually but not always represented by a bus stop, at which buses are expected to arrive and/or depart at the time indicated. Notwithstanding exceptional circumstances such as roadworks, operators are required to ensure that 95% of services serve all timing points within the window of not more than one minute early or five minutes late.

A number used to identify the specific duty any one bus is following for a day, with variations across the country. Other names are sometimes applied, such as car number, carriage number, car run, diagram or duty. Running cards are allocated to vehicles to identify its service for the day and may or may not make their instructions obvious through their number alone.

A journey that is operated according to a contract between two or more organisations, at least one of whom is a bus service provider. Most contracts of this nature provide financial benefit to the operator, usually from a council, and are legally required to be put out to tender among interested parties; payments vary in amount and means although values of around 4 per passenger journey are typical. Some contracts involve paying the relevant authority for the right to run the service instead of receiving a subsidy. In London, contracts involve Transport for London receiving all fares and instead paying operators a set fee.

A journey operated without financial assistance of any kind. Services of this kind are entirely dependent on its passengers to provide sufficient funds in the form of fares for it to sustain a profit. Some commercial services may be operated under contract to specific organisations with no financial benefit to speak of other than fare income.

The maximum number of buses required to keep a service (or groups of services where they share vehicles) operating correctly. This can usually be calculated through careful observation of the timetable; a service that runs every 15 minutes and takes 40 minutes from end-to-end would usually have a Peak Vehicle Requirement of six vehicles (with a five-minute layover at either end).

A small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user’s computer by the user’s web browser while the user is browsing. Cookies were designed to be a mechanism for websites to remember information (such as items in a shopping cart) or to record the user’s browsing activity.

JSON is a text-based data interchange format designed for transmitting structured data. It is most commonly used for transferring data between web applications and web servers.

JSON is often viewed as an alternative to XML, another plain text data interchange format.

A common type of file compression. Zipping one or more files creates a compressed archive that takes up less disk space than the uncompressed version. It is useful for backing up files and reducing the size of data transferred over the Internet.

A byte is the smallest addressable unit of memory in a computer, commonly made up of eight binary digits.