This is unbelievable. Do you think, if I decided to catch coaches/buses everywhere, I could get back some of the money they get from me?
The fact that a publicly-funded organisation refuse to allow access to data because they have been criticised is absolutely scandalous. They get our money for free then dare to get shirty about the people who are funding them?!!
The railway service in the UK is appallingly bad, the majority of the rest of Europe appear to have worked out how to actually make trains work, and yet they have the cheek to do this. Unbelievable.
I'd like to write an app that tracks lateness round the UK and name + shame operators who are doing poorly. I strongly suspect official results are somewhat skewed by averaging/etc., and by focusing on hotspots/representing the data differently you could get a more accurate picture. Doing so would be critical of the rail operators - would they refuse me a license? Would I have to pay for the privilege of determining how effectively my (+ the rest of the people of the UK's) money was being spent?
It's like handing over £50 to somebody and them charging you for the privilege.
£5bn a year and we still have to pay for tickets - must be nice to be in a business where you get money for free THEN GET TO CHARGE FOR YOUR SERVICE ON TOP OF IT.
It's hardly unusual for entities that receive government money to also charge for products/services produced using that money. Three examples I can think of just off the top of my head include 1) the health service in places like France where there are subsidised usage fees, 2) farmers in the EU who get large subsidies from the CAP or the equivalent in the USA, 3) application fees in patent offices.
It is definitely super annoying that this data is not free, but the reality is that it does cost a bit of money to gather and aggregate.
Furthermore, though I frequently take the train, I do consider it unfair that general taxation revenues are used to fund the train services -- especially considering that if you look at the stats they are principally used by the wealthy. Charging for data goes some way to shifting the cost burden of rail back onto the rail travellers themselves, as the person ultimately paying for this data is the traveller that uses the train time app/website.
I'm not contesting that entities which receive government money shouldn't charge also if the economics implies it, rather focusing on the fact that they take a vast amount of taxpayer money which then helps fund greedy companies who deliver giant bags of fail and on top of it all charge for information which, let's face it, is something of a paltry cost to provide, really, certainly as a proportion of the funding they receive.
We might not all use the services, but we are all certainly entitled to investigate and examine how our money is being spent - standing in the way of providing data for what appear to be money-grabbing reasons certainly does not help redistribute the cost to rail users I don't think, and actively gets in the way of highlighting less effective rail operators.
"It is definitely super annoying that this data is not free, but the reality is that it does cost a bit of money to gather and aggregate."
Gathering and aggregating I'm not sure about, but I think the bigger cost is probably the frequency and number of connections to the feeds, which doesn't need to be as costly as it is. Fourth paragraph is most relevant: http://www.lyonanderson.com/post/2670466085/youre-asking-for...
The entire spec for the magstripe on their tickets, and a preliminary spec for the new 2D self-print and phone tickets that are being introduced.
Edit: I have yet to obtain a valid 2D ticket myself, but the promotional image released is at least similar to what the spec describes, and the pre-amble is a match.
Please don't do anything illegal. It's not good for you (obviously!), and it eliminate any legitimate moral ground in the debate. We're trying to do what's right + good here, not to be underhand + malicious.
I'm pretty sure I obtained these documents legally, their webserver should have asked me for a password for the files but for some reason it did not (has since been fixed). They're under copyright though so I can't disseminate them.
The Government want to change that, they don't think that every taxpayer should be paying part of every train user's ticket. The rail companies will get less dependable, probably less overall money. I hope they still go ahead with the long term things, they said it would take 40 years (note: read the article a year ago) to break even on the cost of making it all electric.
There hasn't been any progress since I wrote that and it really does seem that NRE are using the overly broad code of practice as a way to punish those who question their attitudes.
Hardly a progressive way for a body that gets a large amount of public funding to behave.
.. which is, basically, open for everybody to use (in the sense that it requires no authentication). I use it myself to push live data to my mobile phone from my desktop PC.
There are two further elements of this discussion that the article misses.
One is the fundamental approach to maximising value from government-created works. Traditionally, the Crown owns the copyright and then sells them to maximise revenue. The US approach is to make it public domain.
The second issue is that the bar for a creative work covered by copyright is much lower in the UK than in the US. The notorious case is football schedules which are copyrighted, but it also applies to cinema and train times.
You seem to have misunderstood the source of train information. It's a private company that's publicly funded. The Crown does appear to own the copyright.
My point is that the article sidesteps a fundamental question about copyright of government works.
If you believe that the correct way to maximise value is to use the data commercially to maximise revenue then you won't see a problem with the current situation.
If you believe that the correct way to maximise value is to provide the data for free to end users then you'll think it's wrong.
The article implies the latter is true without argument, and implies it's the norm in the UK.
Maximise the value for whom? The data is being monopolistically exploited by a private entity, for private profit. Where is the value for the taxpayer there?
I think most people would agree that taxpayer value for public expenditure should be maximised, and were the money from the licences going directly into the public coffers then we could certainly have a discussion about whether taxpayer value is maximised by selling the data or giving it away for free.
That, however, is not what is happening here. As so frequently happens in the UK, the data is publically funded, and the profits are privately realised.
The government pays the train operating companies to operate trains, not to feed data to iPhone apps, just as they're not paid to sell crisps and sodas from a small cart. This creates value (otherwise there would be no profit to extract), so why not?
The government pays the train companies to run a transport service; departure times are an essential part of that, in a way that crisps quite plainly (or quite saltedly, ha ha ha* ) are not.
I agree that large-scale API provision is added value, and I have no objection to a private company making a profit from that. What I object to is a private company being handed a monopoly on that private data, with no effective oversight being given to the terms under which they provide access to it.
ATOC, by dint of the exclusive licence granted to them by Network Rail, have complete control of the market for this publically-funded data. They are adding value by serving it as a reliable API, certainly; however the price they are able to command has little relation to that value, because they have no competitors.
There has been a similar debate in Norway. According to law the public should have free access to databases that is founded in companies that are own by the public.
Companies with a monopoly or companies that have a political purpose and is founded by the public would also be covered by the law of free access to databases.
The company responsible for departure information in Oslo was very early with open APIs and giving access to developers. Only clausal was that you couldn't use it for commercial work. A couple of months ago they also removed this clausal so now it's free, even for commercial usage. More info here: http://bit.ly/iq1pbT (google translate)
When the trains are consistently late, the train company must refund a portion of the money that rail ticket holders pay. If the data was open, this process would become automated and cost the train companies lots of money.
... and it would therefore work, as presumably intended, as a meaningful incentive.
Whatever licences the Government gives rail-related bodies ought to make free public data access a requirement.
They might be massaging the trains - given a choice between making five trains 28 minutes late or making one train 35 minutes late there is an incentive to choose the former.
So? "Every month, Yarra Trams publishes its performance results for both service delivery and punctuality on the internet, on posters in trams and through our designated customer feedback number 1800 800 166." "If our service delivery or punctuality falls below set levels, we will provide compensation to eligible customers. The performance figures are shown above.
Our performance in April 2011 exceeded the targets, so no compensation can be claimed."
API @ http://ws.tramtracker.com.au/pidsservice/pids.asmx
But then I still don't understand why we, taxpayers, pay money to companies that pay out profits. Loans, fine, but why are we paying money that just leaks out in to shareholders bank accounts instead of being spent on transport and its infrastructure.
It's very simple, when you privatize something, it magically becomes cheaper. Because of "efficiencies". The way this works is you can always get a private company to pitch a service for a lower price than you're currently paying. Then it's up to them to squeeze a profit from that service by providing a lousy service. This is called "the power of the market". But because the service is lousy, and the public doesn't like that, the government has to step in and bribe the private company to make their service better. This is known as "a public-private partnership", or PPP.
It's very simple, when you nationalize something, it magically becomes cheaper. Because it doesn't have to pay out "profits" to "shareholder". The way this works is that you can always get a politicians to promise whatever to whomever, as long as it will get him reelected. Then it's up the the public company to constantly pursue quick successes (usually in the form of various prestige projects which includes hiring huge swaths of overpaid and unfireable employees) while neglecting long term planning and maintenance. When called out on it, they demand a larger operating budget, which if allocated, goes mostly towards making the allocating politician look good, and which if not, results in cuts to front line services to make the responsible politician look bad. This is called "rent seeking". Because the service is lousy, and the public, while not liking that, also isn't going to deliver the required landslide in an election, nothing happens. This is known as "the reason large public companies too often become bloated ungovernable unreformable monsters".
While we have the OP as a fine example of my point, it might help to provide an example of your own. In developed economies, nationalization has historically occurred when a business that the public relies upon has become literally or effectively bankrupt. Can you think of an example of an inefficient nationalized industry in the UK, the EU, or the USA? And in what way has nationalization contributed to that inefficiency?
In many cases the services that have recently been privatized were never nationalized to begin with - they were public services, like garbage collection or public transport, that have no obvious market competition model to follow.
Your definition of "rent-seeking" is also incorrect. Rent-seeking behaviour is when an economic agent attempts to manipulate public policy for private gain. A government body cannot engage in this behaviour by definition, as it does not take a profit, and is not private. It can fight its corner though - seeking more funding - but then it must spend that money on things like schoolbooks or hospital beds. This is considered a horrifying waste of resources to the private sector, which knows that those funds could better be spent on yachts and hookers.
I wrote a snarky reply to illustrate that your broad and generalizing assertion didn't really hold up.
My use of "rent seeking" is fine, there is other gain to extract than pure monetary profit. One is personal prestige: Being the boss of a big department with a big budget is nice (and well paid, even in the public sector).
An example of a public company, a railway one even, squandering billions on useless prestige projects: Danish State Railways procuring a small run of entirely custom made intercity trains instead of getting something off the shelf. It's a 5 billion DKK project, close to a decade late now. Also, changing governments failed to maintain the signals, so they're utterly rotten, causing delays daily.
I'd be quite interested to see the comparisons they make and the raw data they use.
When I worked in the public sector the minimum wage came in and boosted a lot of the low grades pay levels. At the time this was said to be an embarrassment for the government as the minimum wage did little to similarly skilled workers outside of the public sector.
Indeed where I worked practically any of the staff could work for substantially more in an equivalent role in a private firm.
Teachers seem to get less money often in private sector, but benefits of shorter terms, better discipline, better working conditions and the like help considerably. Nurses in private employment seem to get quite a bit more.
What's equivalent to the police force?
Armed forces are supposedly poorly paid, but they get bed and board too.
>The report said the gap - or pay premium - between what a typical public sector worker earns above their equivalent in the private sector has increased to 16.5% over the past two years for salaried workers.
But it says this has risen by 35% for workers paid by the hour, despite efforts by the government to reduce the public sector wage bill.*
At the same time, real pay has fallen for the bottom 30% of private sector workers.
/ Is this a case of damn lies and statistics. If private sector pay falls then the gap widens, no? Is this article just about falling private sector pay due to recession?
Policy Exchange are a Tory think tank and are generally seen to be full of shite. Of course they're going to be trying to create a wedge between private and public sector workers. The reality is that everyone is being screwed by the people at the top, and they know that if they divide us up and get the private sector to hate the unions, and think that they're getting a better deal somehow, the anger about cuts and rising food prices and whatnot is going to be directed onto other people at the bottom, instead of the true tyrants here. Read what the TUC says in the rest of the article.
Don't post reports from centre right think tanks if you want to be balanced. You could find an opposing report from a think tank on the other side of the spectrum.
I can assure you that I'm not naturally on the right of the political spectrum, but I have a fair amount of knowledge of how the public sector works (particularly at the higher levels) and it pretty much aligns with my personal experience.
I was actually angry when they revoked the licence for MyRail then introduced a £5 app that did less under a different brand... I still haven't bought it
You should try the hilarious spoof app on Android called "TheTrainline", which introduces such innovations as:
- its own, dysfunctional keyboard - because Android's keyboard was just too, er, fast. And didn't have a bright green tick button.
- an occasional feature, where after entering a timetable query a progress bar appears, and the app commands you to "Tap the screen" to make the bar advance. Once you have danced like a monkey for them, the app finally allows you to see the result of your query.
- no information about trains that depart in less than five minutes, or have already departed. Because why would you ever want to know about the train you're already on?
It really is a masterful satire of everything a corporate, money-grubbing app commissioned by sociopaths and authored by embittered misanthropes would be - an app that simply hates its users.
The data is not inaccessible because it is a private company. It is because they do not believe it to be in their business interest to make it accessible.
Why that is the case is the real question.
Surely the (presumably small amount of) money they raise from api subscriptions and app sales (minus the development cost) would be hugely outweighed by the increase in ticket sales + reduced dev cost from making the data accessible.
The tube (which i use about once a year) is considerably better at this (different, tighter consortiums). There are a bunch of good apps like Tube Boards and Tube Status (if I used it more I'd pay for some). Even just that, the current 30mins of the timetable, and any delays as a whole, would be a big improvement on what there is now - announcements on the platform.
1. Is data copyrightable, patentable or a trade secret? If not, follow the next steps.
2. Contact as much open-minded licensees as possible and persuade them to leak the data.
3. Build a service to collect the leaked data, collide several samples from varying origins to remove any "watermarks" (and constantly monitor for them), and publish it.
4. If the condition (1) stands true, the leak service should be legal (IMNAL), and service provider can't be obliged to say who's leaking the data.
5. ...
6. PROFIT^W PROTEST!
Childish, and somehow risky (the (2) is tricky), but given enough power, the information could be made public.
If the departure times are copyrightable — there's something really wrong with copyright system.
No licensee is going to leak this data. If they're paying, they aren't going to expend any effort to push it back out to potential competitors for free. And yes, non-commercial is a potential competitor.
If you are interested in transit-related information access, consider signing up for the very low-traffic but occasionally interesting Transit Developers group.
I live in Taipei where the transport company holds back similar data for bus and subway. It's a bureaucratic nightmare and also public/private confusion just like in this post.
How interested would the transit developers group be in 'hacking' the transport system, i.e. ripping apart all the proprietary encodings etc used by ATOC?
I wrote to my local MP about this issue and only got a pre-canned response back. As this only affects the public indirectly there's simply no pressure to change the status quo; priority will always be given to delays and capacity.
The fact that a publicly-funded organisation refuse to allow access to data because they have been criticised is absolutely scandalous. They get our money for free then dare to get shirty about the people who are funding them?!!
The railway service in the UK is appallingly bad, the majority of the rest of Europe appear to have worked out how to actually make trains work, and yet they have the cheek to do this. Unbelievable.
I'd like to write an app that tracks lateness round the UK and name + shame operators who are doing poorly. I strongly suspect official results are somewhat skewed by averaging/etc., and by focusing on hotspots/representing the data differently you could get a more accurate picture. Doing so would be critical of the rail operators - would they refuse me a license? Would I have to pay for the privilege of determining how effectively my (+ the rest of the people of the UK's) money was being spent?
It's like handing over £50 to somebody and them charging you for the privilege.
£5bn a year and we still have to pay for tickets - must be nice to be in a business where you get money for free THEN GET TO CHARGE FOR YOUR SERVICE ON TOP OF IT.
Sorry, angry, but legitimately so I think.