Why it is crucial to manage data ahead of integration in trip planners?

Journey planners provide a tangible visualisation of multimodal mobility data. As a result, the distinction between the management of mobility data and its integration into the trip planning engine is often blurred.

However, it is crucial to make a clear distinction between:

• 2 distinct phases: the data preparation vs the integration of the prepared data into the trip planner’s database,
• Data management (particularly its maintenance) vs data visualisation,
• A consolidated repository of all multimodal mobility data vs a database focused solely on route calculation – a sort of ‘black box’ behind the calculation algorithm.

This distinction have at least three main advantages listed below.

Feed data to all your downstream systems, not just a single journey planner

Several journey planners often coexist within the same geographical area, whether they target the general public, are part of a white-label solution for a Public Transport Authority (PTA), or simply are dedicated to a specific type of travellers. Each of these journey planners reprocesses the datasets before integrating them into its own database. Consequently, no single journey planner can serve as the unique data source for all the others, as it would be unable to extract different data according to the needs of its competitors. This would require the information to be systematically reprocessed before extraction, which is sometimes impossible.

Furthermore, from the perspective of passenger information, trip planning is not the only use for multimodal mobility data. Examples of data consumption include:

• Specific to passenger information: information displays at stops or onboard vehicles, web applications, QR codes that provide real-time information, etc.,
• Specific to the operation of a public transport service: tools for analysing and optimising the service, ticketing systems, feedback loops to transport operations centres (CAD/AVL or AVMS) or scheduling tools…

All these use cases require reliable and rich data. As each end-user system has its own specific characteristics and constraints, it is preferable to rely on dedicated tools for preparing the data before its integration in multiple systems.

Ensure you keep control over your data

Entrusting data preparation to the provider of the trip planning solution has the same main drawback as all outsourcing strategies in this field: it leads to a loss of control and weakens the relative position of PTAs or operators within the ecosystem. It also keeps on fueling legal uncertainty regarding the ownership of multimodal mobility data, making it all the more complex to retrieve data related to one’s own transport service.

It is clear that whoever controls the data holds the reins over the entire multimodal mobility data chain.

Moreover, when data preparation is beyond the control of the PTA or the operator, data quality is inevitably compromised. In fact, only the PTA and the operator are best placed to assess data quality due to their in-depth knowledge of the network, the local area and the transport services. And, they have the necessary legitimacy to request access to the various data sources.

The PTA is also best placed to carry out:

• The consolidation of all data sources, whatever they may be, particularly in geographical areas with a comprehensive public transport network served by numerous operators,
• The quality assessment and harmonisation of the aggregated data, without any particular focus on its re-use or its original operator,
• The incremental enrichment of the data.

Also, the PTA and the operators are accountable for the quality of the data published, particularly as open data, and must comply with regulatory obligations. In this context, it is essential to ensure the data is compliant before publication and to maintain control over end-to-end verification processes…

Optimise your passenger information budget

In a tight budgetary context, public transport authorities – and, by extension, transport operators – may find themselves having to make trade-offs regarding expenditure on passenger information.

One trend currently being observed is a shift away from investment in projects for local trip planning app. The PTA is choosing not to develop and maintain its own app, opting instead to rely on mainstream mobile apps such as Google Maps or Citymapper… at a lower cost. This trend is particularly true when usage of the local app is low compared to that of mainstream apps.

Nevertheless, such a choice does not exempt the PTA from paying attention to the reliability and richness of its data. As a matter of fact, mainstream trip planning solutions tend to make the effort to integrate datasets only when they meet a certain level of completeness in comparision to their data model. This enables them to minimise integration costs and facilitate the addition of information specific to their routing engine. So, it is even more important that the PTA takes all required steps to ensure of a complete dataset before sharing it with external parties.

In addition, if mainstream apps have to carry out specific data preparation work, they will tend to charge the PTA for it in one way or another. Control over multimodal mobility data enables the PTA to strengthen its oversight and guarantee the quality of passenger information, by exerting influence over the applications that use its data.

Ultimately, PTAs that tend to outsource trip planning for budgetary reasons simultaneously strengthen their role in data management and preparation.

➡️ How Chouette and Ara help you manage your data to feed trip planners