Our archive of Bus Open Data

Last July we described how we'd started making an open archive of Bus Open Data Service (BODS) data because nobody else seemed to be doing that.

We used an old 8TB hard drive and set up some scripts to store the daily timetables as well as the live bus locations as both GTFS-RT and SIRI-VM files every 30 seconds. Well, those scripts have been running ever since and the disk will soon be entirely full!

We've had a few outages. The computer that runs the archive got turned off by a cat for two or three days early on and then we lost two full weeks of data in February. That's what can happen when you do this sort of thing only with donated parts and donated broadband.

Open Innovations is now winding down. Without more disk space, and with nobody left to maintain it, this archive will likely fill up and stop at some point in the next two or three months. As we said last year, if someone had a few thousand pounds a year they could take what we've done and set up something much more robust and long-term. Anyone out there want to do that?