Use and Disclosure of Information

Bus Open Data is intended to be freely available, without charge and without restrictions on its use, so that it benefits passengers and supports technological innovation of services and applications, such as third-party journey planners.

Bus operators and local transport authorities who provide and maintain the data must not place additional restrictions on its use or disclosure beyond any set by Scottish Ministers and must provide the legislated data openly and for free. Scottish Ministers similarly cannot set charges for data users to access that data.

Data users may include local transport authorities, regional transport partnerships and bus operators themselves as well as potential passengers. Bus operators may choose to incorporate the data into their own software and services to present passenger travel information in innovative ways to better inform their customers. UK Government open data licencing requires that data users acknowledge their data source, for example, data used was released by the Scottish Government (or Transport Scotland) but that the data user cannot present their service as a ‘Scottish Government’ (or ‘Transport Scotland’) product, which might be considered misleading and could lead to confusion.

Data kept by the Scottish Government (Transport Scotland) will be kept in line with existing data retention policies. We intend to keep for reference all static and some real time information around services, in accordance with section 40 of the 2019 Act.

Overall, Bus Open Data will comply with the Open Government Licence.

We asked:

Do you have any concerns over the use of the open data in this way?

The question was framed as a yes/no question, with a comments box for additional information. Three respondents opted for ‘don’t mind’ and six skipped the question altogether, indicating no strong views on the subject. A strong majority (fifty-eight respondents) had no issue with the use of the data as described. A total of eight responses did note issues with the proposal, four from individuals and four from organisations, however all eight were largely adding caveats or lessons learned to the provision of Open Data, rather than objecting to the data being open.

One response warned against collecting driver data, and another against collecting specific traveller data. We can confirm that there are no plans to collect personal data from either passengers or transport workers under this scheme.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) noted the need to have the collected data be available to a number of groups, including the digitally excluded and those for whom English is a second language. Whilst this is unlikely to apply to technical users of the information (for example, a commercial or academic application developer is unlikely to be digitally excluded) Transport Scotland’s use of the information to update the Traveline Scotland App and Website, already includes accessible access. Traveline also operates a “24/7” phone line for anyone who cannot access digital information.

One response additionally supported the development of an ‘appropriate use’ policy where the data would be used to monitor performance of bus operators. Whilst this kind of guidance would lie outside of the legislation, it has been noted for the development of the supporting guidance covered in Section 4.