Core Improvements: BT’s GeoMND feed received an update in May 2023, which provided benefits to the data quality of BT’s rail insights datasets. These updates included:
- More accurate timestamp information
- Uncertainty metrics
- Increased density of data points
These updates improved the accuracy of rail journey identification, by improving the routing and the temporal accuracy of journeys. BT’s rail insights are built up as an aggregation of individual rail journeys, and so by improving the accuracy of these individual journeys, the data quality of the output datasets are improved.
Service Outage History:
To supplement our outage APIs we have built a front-end to search for viewing outages at a glance. The site is available at Service Status (bt.com) or by navigating to Rail Portal -> Support -> Service Status.
Service Outage History Features:
Start date & end date: Select your data range to explore outages by date. Data has been provided from 1st January 2023. Outage flag: Filter by the Red, Amber, Green status. LAD level data: While we currently have the status tagged at the Local Authority District, we will implement a filter by LAD in future versions (coming soon).
Data Availability:
Due to the upgrades made to BT’s GeoMND in May 2023, historical data can only be made available back to this date. Therefore, once the update to V3 is released data will be available from historically from this date.
Existing schema changes:
No changes have been made to the existing schema structure. However two functional changes to the data should be noted:
- Short rail: Rail legs identified as ‘short rail’ have been re-assigned as road legs across all schemas. Therefore ‘short_rail_passenger_volume’ columns will always report zero volume in V3.
- Unallocated rail: Rail legs that had been routed to the rail network but not been assigned a train service were previously defined as ‘unallocated rail’ legs. An additional train matching stage to check for mis-assignment to adjacent stations has been implemented to assign a service to legs that were genuine rail legs. Where a match still can’t be found these legs are re-assigned as road legs.
New schemas: This release incorporates three new schemas, covering different aggregation of the same underlying dataset. Availability of these schemas is dependant on the classification of the beneficiary organisation.
These new schemas are:
- Modal share – daily
- Modal share – frequency
- Station catchment – frequency
Impact of changes:
The data quality improvements in V3 have focussed on improving the rail identification accuracy at a UK wide level, with no focus on individual regions, operators, or routes. There are limited publicly available datasets that can be used to validate the data quality and improvements made to the system at a marco, UK wide scale.
Planned Data Outage - Mon 25th to Wed 27th September
- 24-09-2023 23:00to27-09-2023 22:59
Planned
Software version 2.2
Dates: From Mon 25/09/2023 to Weds 27/09/2023 with a potential extension to Thu 28/09/2023.
Impact: Data will not be created for these days. However the website and API portal will run throughout meaning you access data for all other days.
Version 2.2 released - Friday 25th August 2023
- 25-08-2023 15:00to25-08-2023 15:00
Planned
Software version 2.2
Live Service Status: This will let you know if everything is running well or if there are issues. A bell icon will appear in the top right corner of every page.
If it’s green everything is working well and you will receive the daily data as expected.
If it’s amber then there is an issue. Click on the bell to view more details of what is happening and when it will be fixed.
If the bell is red then the service is not working. Again click on the bell to view details and see when a fix is planned.
You can clear events when you're read them and find them on the Service Status page.
Data Download – Multi-Select on Locations and Stations - Feedback from users suggested this is the biggest issue with efficiently running queries and getting data out.
You can now add up to 40 station codes or location codes on one query as well as still select a single one. You can do this by typing them in or simply copying and pasting from a list you’ve saved.
Planned Maintenance
- 23-06-2023 17:00to23-06-2023 17:30
Planned
Software version N/A
Our website https://activeintelligence.bt.com/railportal/ will be down for 30 minutes from 18:00 tomorrow afternoon, Friday 22nd June for some planned maintenance.
Access to the knowledge base and data download will be unavailable at this time.
If you have any questions please get in touch on activeintelligencesupport@bt.com.
Version 2.1 released - Thursday 4th May 2023
Planned
Software version 2.1
Data is available from May 2022 and is being updated daily.
Improved data quality, particularly with absolute volumes at stations.
Version 2.0 released - Tuesday 28th February 2023
Planned
Software version 2.0
Data is available from 1st November 2022 and is being updated daily.
As of 8th March 2023, there are columns in the Passenger Volumes; Critical Load and Alighters and Boarders awaiting population.
New schema TfL Interchanges: Journey Mode and TFL station (when metro) of journeys made before and after a rail journey to/from a London Terminus.
Data Quality and Web Portal Improvements - Wednesday 30th November 2022
Planned
Software version 1.2
Data Quality: Improved assignment of services to stations.
Web Portal: Bug fixes and content updates
Known Issues:
Train service assignment: Higher volumes of rail legs as journeys are being split across too many services.
Alighters / Boaders: Counts may associate with the wrong station. This is caused by issues in train service assignment.
Entry vs exit volumes at some stations are unbalanced. This is caused by issues in train service assignment.
~5% of services have no passengers assigned. This may be valid in some cases and requires further investigation
Some rail legs are incorrectly categorised as Subway.
The issues above will be improved or resolved at next release since we will have:
The new timetable with additional timing data.
Incorporated use of a station pair dataset to check for inaccuracies.
Planned Outage - Tuesday November 29th 2022
Planned
Software version -
Planned Outage for Monday 21st November at 12:00 lasting several hours.
Web Portal and APIs will be available during this time.
Potential impact is some data loss which will affect Wednesday 30th November's daily data release
Planned Outage - Monday 21st November 2022
Planned
Software version
Planned Outage for Monday 21st November at 12:00 lasting several hours.
Web Portal and APIs will be available during this time.
Potential impact is some data loss which will affect Tuesday 22nd November's daily data release