Regional Transport Provider - Customer and Ticket Sales Data contains information about customer and ticket sales data (electronic smartcards and paper tickets) in a largely urban commuter travel area in central England. It contains information about concessionary card holders, smart card holders and their boarding records, which can be used to depict regional use of public transport (mainly bus use) between November 2009 and March 2024.

Content

The dataset consists of three extracts of two tables. Typically these extracts are further divided into multiple CSV files, each with millions of rows. There are minor schema differences between the three extracts, please see the variable dictionary for full details.

The two tables are transaction records (with columns on timestamps, payment methods, origin and destination) and customer demographics (with columns on age, gender and residential location (postcode, postcode sector or LSOA depending on the extract), along with an indication of whether the user is a concessionary card (e.g. disabled or elderly) or "commercial" smart card holder. Sometimes this latter indication is instead presented by the data being further split into two tables. The data is also available via a database login to a postgreSQL server. It can be accessed by using pgAdmin4 or a similar tool in the secure environment.

Historically only concessionary users would have smartcards, however more recently the general population also now typically uses them too. Therefore, the proportion of concessionary vs commercial users has changed significantly through the dataset's time range.

For detailed description of the columns contained within the data, see the Variable Dictionary; and for an overview of the characteristics of the data, see the Data Summary. These files can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.

Quality, Representation and Bias

The dataset contains small percentages of missing values and covering multiple years. This dataset is limited to a regional transport provider and contains only concessionary card holders and smart card holders. Only a small portion of data are associated with non-concessionary smart card holders.