As of today, ScotTravel is temporarily offline. If you have tried to visit it and found a message saying it is unavailable, this post explains why, and what we are doing about it.
In March we wrote about the changes coming to the NextBuses API that powers ScotTravel. The short version: the organisation running it was handing the service to a new commercial operator, the April 30th deadline was firm, and the free data allowance that kept ScotTravel running at no cost was being cut from a usable amount to 30 requests per day. We said we would monitor the situation and look for alternatives.
We have looked. Here is what we found.
The Alternatives We Investigated
The most obvious free route was the Bus Open Data Service (BODS), a government-funded open data service we had not previously used. We signed up and got an API key. Unfortunately, BODS covers England only. Scottish bus data is outside its scope entirely. That ruled it out for a service built specifically for Scotland.
The new commercial operator taking over NextBuses is TransportAPI. Their service does cover Scotland, uses the same data format we already talk to, and would require only a small change to the ScotTravel code. They offer a free tier. But that free tier is capped at 30 requests per day, which is the same limit mentioned in the March email. That is enough to test the API. It is not enough to run a real service on. On a busy morning at a single stop, 30 requests would be gone before 9am.
Paid pricing through TransportAPI is available, but it is not publicly listed. You have to contact them. We do not yet know what a fair usage plan for a non-commercial accessibility service would cost, or whether a concessionary rate exists for that kind of use.
Why We Took It Offline Now
We had two choices before the April 30th deadline. We could migrate to the new TransportAPI endpoint and run on the 30-requests-per-day free tier, or we could take the service offline until we have a clear path forward.
We chose to take it offline. The reason is straightforward: a ScotTravel that stops working after the first handful of users each morning is worse than no ScotTravel at all. The whole point of the service is that it is reliable. Someone at a bus stop in the rain, relying on it to know when their bus is due, should not get an error because the daily allowance ran out at 8am. That would be worse than the service not existing.
We are not walking away from it. The code is all still there. The stop database is still there. The site is ready to go the moment we have a sustainable data source.
What Happens Next
We are going to contact TransportAPI directly to ask about pricing for non-commercial accessibility services. It is possible there are options that are not listed publicly. We are also keeping an eye on whether Traveline Scotland or the Scottish Government open data programme offers anything useful for this kind of use case.
If you use ScotTravel and want it back, the most useful thing you can do is let us know. Feedback from real users is the strongest argument we have when talking to data providers about the value of what we are building. You can use the feedback page to send us a message.
We will update the blog when we know more. We built ScotTravel because it was needed. That is still true.