The National Public Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) is a crucial data set containing information about “what” is “where” for all public transport in Great Britain. It covers every bus stop, tram stop, metro station, train station, airport and ferry terminal in England, Scotland and Wales. Previously, Thoughtworks helped the Department for Transport (DfT) migrate NaPTAN to the Google Cloud Platform, building a foundation for the transformation explored in this article. You can read about that part of the story in more detail here.
Modernizing and migrating NaPTAN to the Google Cloud Platform helped to cut costs, improve collaboration, and overcome persistent data challenges for the DfT — and that was just the beginning of the story.
With a new scalable and highly capable foundation for NaPTAN in place, our teams were able to think beyond the challenges of today and start helping the DfT make valuable, lasting improvements to the data set that would help to deliver value for years to come. This started with the delivery of NaPTAN’s first new functionality since 2005.
NaPTAN is a crucial but unassuming data set that underpins our public transport. By continuing to innovate with the latest technology we have improved the quality of the data and reduced the cost of maintaining the system. Demonstrating the value of partnerships across the public, private and technology sectors.
Optimizing data retention and storage costs
The first of these new features was data retention functionality — an automated system for saving and backing up NaPTAN files in a defined pattern. Now, output files are saved and archived for 100 years, making them easily accessible for future reference or restoration purposes. By utilizing the automation capabilities in the Google Cloud Platform, this fully automated functionality helped the DfT reduce file storage costs and associated carbon emissions by more than 95%.
This capability also proved vitally useful when one local authority corrupted its data while migrating between versions. Using the new data retention functionality , the DfT was able to provide a version of their data enabling them to restore it in a matter of minutes.
The automated data retention functionality actually helped deliver value for the DfT much faster than we might have expected. Very soon after launching it, one local authority corrupted their data, and was able to almost immediately restore it from the data we had stored within NaPTAN — avoiding a huge amount of disruption.
Enabling intuitive data removal
The second new feature was one that had been requested by stakeholders for many years — managed removal. Managed removal is the capability for users to remove stops that no longer physically exist. In the past, local authorities tried every workaround imaginable to show that a stop was no longer served or active, but ultimately had no way to actually remove a stop from the data set. This led to significant data quality issues and operational challenges.
Now, removing stops is a straightforward process, helping to ensure all the stop data held within NaPTAN is relevant and usable. Stakeholders from across the public transport ecosystem can manage their data more effectively and remove stops as easily as they can add them — filling a vital capability gap that had been present in NaPTAN for decades.
In addition to these features, the Google Cloud Platform enabled us to deliver numerous small improvements to the user experience that added up to a complete UX transformation. Now, NaPTAN is more capable and available, and easier to use than ever before.
Whee that was easy. The team was really helpful! Looking forward to cleaning up more of our old redundant stops from the data set now we can.
I was listening to the arguments about where we mark the location of a bus stop, and I said "Why don't we make it where the passenger needs to stand?", and this just felt like the right way to approach it.
New capabilities enable a new mindset
In addition to major availability and cost optimizations, by migrating and modernizing NaPTAN on the Google Cloud Platform and using that foundation to develop new capabilities, we helped DfT:
Improve user confidence in the system and make uploading data and engaging with NaPTAN easier and more intuitive for local authorities and other stakeholders.
Retain data for up to 100 years in an easily accessible system without driving up storage costs.
Permanently remove more than 3,000 redundant stops from the data set.
The most impactful change of all was that by resolving so many of the challenges that had persisted around NaPTAN for many years, we enabled the ecosystem to evolve its mindset from primarily data-focused to passenger-focused.
For the first time, the teams that work with the NaPTAN data set have the space and capabilities to start devising innovative ways to improve connected public transport experiences for everyone.
Now that adding new capabilities to NaPTAN is easier, the DfT is planning further evolutions that can improve the lives of passengers, drive cost efficiency, and even bolster the UK economy. Improving the visibility and availability of information around accessibility is top of the agenda.
Across the project, an entire ecosystem has gone from being focused on data in a data set to being focused on how that data will enable a user’s experience. Everybody is aligned on what data should do and how it should be defined. It’s a huge swing in mindset, which I’m really proud of.
