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Innovation through Open Data at Transport for London Rikesh Shah Digital Partnerships, TfL

This document is TfL Restricted

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Overview

Background

Our business

Our customers

Our open data

Outcomes

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Our scale

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Our scale

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Our purpose

Keep London moving, working and growing and make life in the city better

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What our customers want

Understand what we stand for

Excellent

reliability and

customer

experience

Value for Money Progress &

Innovation

Trust

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Customers expect more from mobile

Monthly visits to tfl.gov.uk – desktop, mobile and tablet

Device Types Visits

Mobile Phone 14,817,185 66.2%

Desktop 6,113,706 27.3%

Tablet 1,418,590 6.3%

Other 19,194 0.1%

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Mobility – increasing consumption

81% of Londoners use

a smartphone

42% of Londoners use apps for real-

time travel info

83% of Londoners use

TfL website

83% time spent on apps when using

smartphones

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Transparency

Reach

Niche products

Economic benefit

Innovation

Why open data?

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Available in the API – over 200 elements including;

• Bus arrivals

• Tube movements, departures, status

• Cycle Hire docking station status

• River boat status and arrivals

• Overground, Rail and Trams arrivals and status

• Journey Planner

• Accessibility

Types of data

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Non Public transport modes - data

• Roads

• Cycling

• Air quality

• Casualty, collision and vehicle raw data files

• Detailed provisional and final casualty figures

• Quarterly and annual figures for the total number Killed or

Seriously Injured (KSI) casualties

• Top line bus safety data

• Detail accident geo-location data

• Live roads disruption and planned works data

• Live camera images on 5 second loops

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Outcomes

...over 12,000

developers

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Outcomes - financial

• Around £100m direct value to London

• Technology investment in London and elsewhere off the back of our data

• Around 1,000 jobs estimated to be enabled by our open data ecosystem

• An estimated 175,000 people are now employed in the digital technology

industry in London, in 45,000 companies with £30bn annual turnover

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Open data license terms

• Based on the UK Open Government License with minimal additions

• Developers must register with TfL

• They receive access tokens from our API portal, used to access data

• Meter and throttle usage should it reach unacceptable levels

• Developers give attribution to TfL (powered by TfL) and must not use

TfL brand marks or imply they are ‘official’ TfL products

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Operational realtime systems and data repositories

Individual system APIs and reference data

Normalised single API

Single Sign On

Responsive web Native apps

Access layer

How our open data works

17 The Unified API

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Everything on cloud

• Pay for what you use, not for what’s standing idle, no upfront infrastructure

costs

• Completely elastic, limitless capacity on demand

• Massive benefits from complete automation and consistency between

environments

• Lower maintenance costs

• Blue/green deployment – zero downtime

• Highly secure

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Security

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Some examples...

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Customer travel apps

Hi Thomas

Your usual route has severe

delays today. We recommend

you use the District Line to get

to your destination.

We’re starting to work more closely

with app partners who have around

10% of market share of London

travel apps.

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This document is TfL Restricted

Apple partnership with TfL

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This document is TfL Restricted

Twitter partnership with TfL

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1 Waze and TfL partnership

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Google partnership with TfL

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All open data users

Most of the 12000+ registrations for our API are from

individuals or academics. We value their ability to

use our data to come up with new and creative

ideas or for academic research on urban transit.

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We are engaging with our open data community via

our blog, events and hackathons. We’re also almost

ready to launch our new open data discussion forum

– watch this space!

Benefits

- Get valuable feedback on our data and API

- New innovations using our data

- Reputation and transparency

- Knowledge sharing

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Key considerations

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Engagement

- Engagement with digital partners

- Partnerships

- Operational day-to-day engagement

- Summits

- Blogs

- Hackathons and accelerators

- Forums

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Culture change

- Champion at Board level

- Not a technology project but a customer

one

- Engage at the design stage

- Set up champions across the company

- Data standards

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Thank you

Rikesh Shah

Transport for London