DK'Bus publishes its real-time information in open data

In the north of France, there is a large city that has been a frontrunner of public transport for years. It has experimented with several programmes in favour of travellers and commuters, to the point that its mayor was the French Ministry of Transport in 2024. Can you guess which city we are talking about? It is Dunkirk!

Dunkirk is a major port city with over 85,000 inhabitants that was the first large European city to experiment a 100% free transportation schema in 2018. It rolled-out another major innovation in our field: a SIRI feed in open-data, available without hassle on the French National Access Point (transport.data.gouv.fr).

DK’Bus SIRI feed

As of today, the open-data feed for real-time information for DK’Bus can be found on the French National Access Point on this page. It is only available in SIRI.

It covers the entire network and can be tested directly via the French NAP.

Technical highlights

The technical highlights for the SIRI feeds are:

• Its 100% availability,
• The possibility to use “open-data” to access the authenticated feed (as advised by the French NAP),
• The availability of discovery endpoints:
  • Check Status,
  • Lines Discovery,
  • Stop Points Discovery,
• The available of 2 SIRI services:
  • Estimated Timetable (ET),
  • Stop Monitoring (SM).

To explore the feeds, you can use the tooling created by the French National Access Points by clicking on ‘Try me!’.

Learnings for other networks

From the interview of DK’Bus Manager of Digital solutions, we learned that the most important success factors to set up an open-data SIRI feed are:

• Knowing exactly what you want (e.g., what is your use case, who is your data consumer, which SIRI services you want to open)
• Relying on a tool that does exactly what you need.

Also, bonus points are for the product to:

• Have a well-thought flow, so it is easy for you to do what you want,
• Be easy to use with a nice user interface, so you can share the workload with your team,
• Lead you to be autonomous in its use, so you are not dependant of the product team.