Digital Travel Data Services

The Digital Travel Data Services (DTDS) project aims to make travel information and journey planning easier and more accessible.

As part of this project, we will enhance the Traveline Scotland website and app to improve the way people access and plan journeys online and bring a fresh look and feel to the services. Traveline Scotland users will be able to tailor their search results to show the things that matter most to them, whether that’s the fastest or cheapest route, a step-free route, or the route with the greenest carbon footprint.

We will improve information across transport modes including fares, accessibility, active travel, emissions, disruptions, and real-time information. The project will not only look at public transport modes, such as bus and rail, but also seek to provide active travel data, such as walking, cycling, and wheeling routes.

The project will help to progress the Scottish Government’s Programme for Government commitment to procure and improve the quality of public transport journey planning services across Scotland.

The new system aims to provide a single source of truth for public transport and travel information in Scotland. It’s important that this information is provided as open data, free for anyone to use.

Making the data freely available gives transport operators and other journey planners the ability to use it in their own travel tools, giving confidence that the information they provide is to the highest standard.  We intend to host this data, and make it universally available, so that transport operators and third-party planners such as Google and Mobility as a Service (MaaS) providers can use it to further enhance the experience for their customers too.

Travel is essential for access to work, education, health, and leisure opportunities. We want to break down the barriers to accessing public transport by making more data and information available to everyone. We want to help people plan journeys that suit their needs, whether focused on costs, time, carbon emissions, or accessibility requirements. Improvements to the Traveline Scotland website and app, and other journey planning tools, will make it easer for users to make better, more informed travel choices.

By providing better information about sustainable public transport options and active travel routes, we hope to give people confidence that they can complete their journey without the need of a car, and in return gain the health benefits of being more active, and improvement in air quality.

The project also supports the ongoing delivery of fully integrated, smart ticketing and payment services across all public transport, and will help deliver our vision to use data and technology to improve information about public transport and active travel options, providing more convenient and user-friendly access to digital journey information.

• March 2023 – Four-year contract (with possible extension of two years) awarded to Trapeze Group (UK) Ltd to deliver the next generation of journey planning in Scotland
• 2024 – New version of Traveline Scotland goes live
• 2025 – 2 further phases of improvements planned

We are working with Traveline Scotland Limited and Trapeze Group (UK) Ltd to deliver this project, establishing a DTDS Project Team.

Traveline Scotland is the Managed Service Provider for the DTDS project. They will continue to manage the Traveline Scotland journey planning website and app, along with the outgoing open data feeds, and provision of their 24/7 call centre.

Trapeze Group UK will deliver the digital front and back-end systems, with technical responsibility for collecting, maintaining, and enhancing the available data.

Transport Scotland own the DTDS contract and oversee delivery of the project, and the DTDS Project Team will deliver the full refresh to Traveline Scotland website and app and the underlying Data Management systems that will manage transport data.

You can contact us at DTDS@transport.gov.scot

We will continue to engage with stakeholders throughout the lifetime of this project. As part of our engagement plans we are working closely with stakeholders to ensure they have the opportunity to feed into our plans, and help shape project requirements, for example, by identifying relevant data sources and providing feedback at various stages of development.

We are looking for volunteers to help test ideas and mock ups of how the new website and app. Your feedback will help to inform their design and functionality, making sure they are easy to use and helpful for everyone. If you’d like to share your views please sign up using the online form.