What data infrastructure do we need in Wales to encourage innovation in transport?
We need innovation
We need to develop and enable new approaches to moving people and goods around Wales. If we don’t change the way we think about mobility we’ll end up with more, and more congested roads, with people and goods spending longer and longer to get anywhere. Leaving aside the pollution and social effects of all of our transport choices.
We need innovation in your transport and movement systems. This is something that governments both national and local, presumably, want to encourage.
We don’t normally look to governments for innovation. Instead we look to them for infrastructure. What is the infrastructure that governments could offer that would support and enable transport innovation?
Data (obviously).
Which datasets?
To help local and national governments think through where the gaps are we are working with Cardiff University.
Dr Irina Harris is a senior lecturer in logistics and operations modelling at Cardiff Business School. She’s given us some current and potential future scenarios for the movement of people and goods. We have identified some of the key datasets that could usefully form an infrastructure layer based on those scenarios
Some of those datasets are already published in useful ways with an open licence (take a bow Traveline Cymru). Others we know are not available, or are only available under a restrictive licence.
A chunk of others may be available but we haven’t found them yet.
Open not just public
We’re focused on open data here, not just public data. So we want to be able to get hold of the underlying data, copy it into our own systems and build other services on top of it without restrictions.
Please do get involved
We’re about to start a detailed hunt for those missing datasets. You could really help us. If you know where the data is already published under an open licence (and if it’s available in helpful ways like via an api) we would really appreciate it if you could point us in the right direction.
At the end of this project we’ll try to visualise, in a helpful way, the lay of the land in Wales with regards to the specific types of open data we think will be helpful to support transport innovation.
And we hope that this will be helpful to organisations that want to support transport innovation in identifying key datasets and opening them up for the good of Wales.
We’re collating datasets on this Google Sheet. Please do edit it to add more datasets if you know of them.
Thanks for reading.
Please clap so I know you were here…
I’m Ben from The Satori Lab. We work to support public servants so they have the right tools, skills and culture to design excellent public services.
Get in touch if that’s something you can help with.
You may also know me from Twitter where I am @likeaword.
