TfL lift restrictions on data

There's going to be a lot of happy developers today, as TfL have announced they are lifting all restrictions on the commercial reuse of their data. Hopefully this means that travellers will see a lot of new creative apps (including mobile tube apps) to help us get around London.


The future by idrewuk
Chris MacLeod, Director of Group Marketing in Tfl implies that today's announcment is just a beginning with openness of data and said: "I hope that our announcement will result in new relationships between the open data community and TfL/London’s Datastore. We know from international experience that the majority of smartphone apps built on public data are focused around the reuse of public transport data

"TfL accepts the developers need to recover their costs and derive a return from their time in creating new applications.

"This move will ensure that developers will be able to produce products independently and provide customers with a wide range of up-to-date applications and services.'"

By using TfL's Developers' Area web developers can get hold of a number of data sets and feeds to live London Underground/Tube travel news on London's Datastore.

Information on bus routes, bus stops and data from London Underground's Rolling Origin and Destination Survey will be added by the end of June.

The London Datastore currently hosts travel-related data sets including: Station Locations, Oyster Ticket Stop Locations, London Underground Signals Passed at Danger (SPADs), TfL Investment Programme and TfL Business Plan.

They said: "We welcome your feedback so let us know your priority datasets and don’t forget to follow @londondatastore (on Twitter) to keep up with alerts of further datasets to follow."