The open data standard for bikeshare. GBFS makes real-time data feeds in a uniform format publicly available online, with an emphasis on findability.

Under the North American Bikeshare Association’s leadership, GBFS has been developed by public, private sector and non-profit bike share system owners and operators, application developers, and technology vendors.

GBFS is intended as a specification for real-time, read-only data – any data being written back into individual bikeshare systems are excluded from this spec.

Tap On, Tap Off is one of several names given to a type of Contactless Model 2 payment method. It allows you to simply “tap” your contactless payment card (or device) onto a reader at the start of your journey and “tap” again on a reader when you complete your journey. What you are charged for the journey is calculated later and then automatically from your account. Often this charge will be capped at a maximum amount if enough journeys are taken within a specific period of time, e.g. 24 hours.

This is different to Contactless Model 1 where the products you are buying are totalled up by the cashier, or a self-service machine, and you pay the total on the screen with your contactless payment card. If you want to buy a specific ticket on a bus or tram in the UK, you will use Contactless Model 1.

BODS provides bus timetable (TransXChange), real time vehicle location (SIRI-VM) and fares (NeTEx) data for every local bus service in England. It was commissioned following the Bus Services Act 2017, which included improvements designed to make commercial bus services more accessible to passengers. It is a Department for Transport led initiative to enable new applications, products and services for passengers.

The Bus Open Data Service is used by operators who publish their data, and anyone who wishes to download it. Operator source data can also be downloaded from Passenger’s Open Data Portal.

Open data is data that has been made available to the public for personal, educational or commercial use. It is usually released under an open data license, such as the Open Government License Version 3.0.

Many public transport operators release their data as open data. Certain datasets must be released to the public under UK law – this currently includes TransXChange. From 2020 onwards, this will also include information about fares and vehicle locations, which comes from Automatic Vehicle Location systems.

In 2020, the Department for Transport launched a new service called the Bus Open Data Service, BODS for short. It will become the main online directory of data about buses in England.

A good source of open data in GTFS format, covering UK-based public transport operators, is Passenger’s open data website.

ETA is often displayed on the screens on bus stops or train stations. It is a prediction of when a vehicle will arrive, based on where it is at that moment. It can also be used by a journey planner as an indication of when a traveller will arrive at a destination.