OpenDataScotland
Add Stagecoach Open Data as a source
On the back of some Twitter enquiries about bus open data I discovered Stagecoach publish their schedules and fares as open data: https://www.stagecoachbus.com/open-data
As these are just file downloads as a page we'll need to write a scraper for this.
Considerations
- What is the license for these? It doesn't appear to be explicitly stated. Maybe worth getting in touch with Stagecoach on the email address on the page to ask them
- The file downloads themselves are just zip files that are split up by region that contain XML files
- Should we consider unzipping these files and serving the individual XML files?
- The file downloads cover regions outside Scotland (e.g. England and Wales). Should we include these?
The page states that the data is
available to the public, for personal, educational or commercial use
so we should be fine to publish this ourselves.
Furthermore, the data is auto-updating, ie. when fares get updated, so we should really make wee scrape script to update this data every so often.
Sweet! I think the best way to split these up would be to have a dataset per region and then have the individual files with the schedules and fares attached to the dataset e.g.
- Stagecoach Bluebird
- Stagecoach East Scotland
@johnnymck did you manage to get anything started on this that you could commit to a branch/fork?