There are a few steps to follow in order to ensure that the data itself is factually correct and complete enough to provide a good experience for bus users. To help operators with this we are providing them with multiple tools in Passenger Cloud so that they can review their data:
- A journey planner in Passenger Cloud that shows on-bus and mobile ticket fare products for individual journey plans based on the fares dataset currently being viewed.
- A fare preview tool that allows operators to view fare products based on specific start and end stops on a specific line so that operators can quickly query fares for a specific trip.
- A fare triangle export for every product on every line so that operators can see an overview of the full fare chart for that specific combination. This exports as a CSV with columns/rows denoting the fare zone and the stop name.
The Draft fares panel will show the date of the most recent upload, along with a link to preview the fares data.
Fares in Journey Planner
Some journeys have multiple on-bus tickets as well as tickets with validity for certain times of day and this preview tool makes testing those tickets easy because you can see the fares that will be displayed for a large range of journey plans, including those at different dates/times. This tool gives operators a preview of the fares that will be displayed to users before publishing their data and is accessible by clicking ‘preview it here’ on a draft or published dataset. Tickets are ordered alphabetically by Passenger Class.
Preview NeTEx Data
After clicking through to preview the fare data you will be presented with the Journey plan preview tool. In the left-hand menu there is a link to ‘Preview NeTEx Data’ which you can use to preview your fare data. When clicking into the Line dropdown the user should be shown a list of lines that we have fares data for.
To get to fares for a specific journey you must select a line, a start stop, and an end stop, and then click ‘Find fares’. We will then display all of the single and return fares related to the journey from the uploaded fares data. We will also show which mobile tickets will be displayed in the journey planner for this journey.
For most fare lookups we recommend using the journey plan preview, but this tool is very useful for looking at specific fares and for getting an understanding of the completeness of the uploaded data.
Fare Triangle
A fare triangle shows all point-to-point fare combinations for a single fare product on a single line and can be exported as a CSV from Passenger Cloud, we recommend this for quickly checking the fare data across an entire line.
This is accessed from the ‘Fare triangle’ link in the left-hand menu when viewing a fare dataset.
From here you can download a fare triangle for a product on a selected line.
Continue to the next article on Fares in Journey Planner: Publishing Fare Datasets in Journey Planner