Measuring the quality of Public Transport Journey Planning

Public Transport Journey Planning systems such as Traveline or Transport Direct have been around for nearly a decade now. All current systems rely on a small number of vendors who have developed the tools necessary to collate timetable information from a large number of disparate sources and to then integrate that data into a single data set that is closely aligned with the specific vendor´s journey planning algorithm. A number of changes are occurring in the Journey Planning software market that are challenging the status-quo. Google has entered the public journey planning market with its own format for public transport data and its own journey planning software. The UK government´s push to providing open public transport data is also enabling new entrants to the market. These changes should challenge us to ask whether there is a need to measure the quality of journey planning software. Such a quality measure can be used by bodies procuring journey planning software. Alternatively, in a de-regulated market such quality measures can be used to provide confidence to operators and travellers about the provided journey plans. In this paper we explore the issues that affect the quality and user´s perception of quality, based on our own experience of developing journey plan software over a decade.