I recently stumbled across the plans to (eventually) make all future Traffic Regulation Orders digital. The plan seems to be for the Digital Traffic Regulation Orders (D-TROs) to be published online at a dedicated portal. This seems to be mostly aimed at making them usable by automated vehicles but the legislation they mention does mention the regulations helping “to enable information about the effects of traffic regulation measures to be communicated to or acted upon by … electronic equipment designed to undertake or facilitate the driving of other vehicles on roads” which seems like it might apply to generic mobile navigation apps to my untrained eye (or would that only apply to dedicated sat navs?).
While this seems like it might drag these out of locked cabinets behind the traditional “beware of the leopard” sign, they do seem to be following the government’s new favourite trick for hiding data in plain sight[1] by inventing yet another[2]special data standard that seems destined to be supported by nothing but a handfull of pieces of very expensive proprietary software[3].
However, this forum does have a pool of people familiar with arcane data formats and who might be able to surmount that issue if the data had the potential to be useful to us. In principle it should be as they will contain things like official maxspeed, maxheight, turn restrictions, oneway sections etc., but I’m struggling to find anything about the license the data will be published under. The terms and conditions say that “All content, trademarks, and other intellectual property associated with D-TRO service are owned by us or our licensors. You may not use, reproduce, or distribute any content without our prior written consent.”, but this would seem to be in direct conflict with the legislation saying that the D-TROs are to be used to facilitate the driving of vehicles on the road.
Has anyone here looked into this already?
Do we think there is a realistic chance we might be able to use this information or is it destined to be hopelessly entangled with Data that OS is never going to license for wider use?
Or is this still too early a stage to even start discussing them?
You actually have to jump through hoops to register with them before you can access it, but that might be because it still seems to be in beta. ↩︎
see “open data” standards for bus routes, train timetables et al. ↩︎
or worse, require you to sign up to an expensive “DSP” ↩︎
It looks fine! It’s kind of a complex data model but that’s because the data is kind of complex. I can’t think of how I’d have done it better, to be honest. (Unless there’s some existing standard I’m not aware of that they decided not to use.)
It’s government policy that the OGL should be used for all public sector data unless there’s a reason not to. So I’d assume it will be OGL-licensed. If it’s not, then it’s likely of no use to us.
It seems that the service is already live although I’m not sure if anyone’s publishing to it. I’ve signed up for an account but it’s apparently awaiting approval…
I think there should be some in there? If I’m reading it correctly this article indicates that “Kent County Council, Essex, Lancashire and Transport for West Midlands” have been participating in the private beta (via software from a company that had just been gobbled up by a bigger player).
In their FAQ they do answer yes when asked if Sat Nav vendors will be subject to an SLAs and then refer to their Terms of Use (5.3). I would assume that if any of their final terms include any requirements to keep the data current or give them special in app acknowledgement etc. then we’d be out of luck?
I wonder if it’s worth asking what license they’re planning on imposing on their public GitHub? From previous discussions I think if it ends up being a collection of data that individual councils have pulled out of OS MasterMap then we might also have issues even if the top level collection is nominally useable.
Incidentally that FAQ also mentions a Curb Data Specification by the Open Mobility Foundation[1] which seems to be used to publish parking information[2] in some US cities.
Even if that’s the case, the interesting information in a D-TRO is the change to traffic restrictions, which won’t be part of an OS dataset at the point when the order is published.
Trying to reconstruct parts of the NSG from data in these, or derive other useful nuggets of information might fall foul of OS copyright, but we’ve already got our own data plus OS Open USRN, OS Open Roads and OS Open Linked Identifiers.