Why can't we have a bus Betaville?

I was excited to read about Betaville, described as a collaborative online platform for proposals on urban design "in which ideas for new works of public art, architecture, urban design, and development can be shared, discussed, tweaked, and brought to maturity in context, and with the kind of broad participation people take for granted in open source software development..."

What communities also need is an application that displays their present bus, train and other public transport schedules and routes on a map that allows the user to also enter proposed or amended services to see potential overlaps and service and modal connections and the potential impact of timetable adjustment.

Such a tool will allow communities to design services for themselves with the aid of substantive modelling data. It can be achieved by integrating bus and train operators data (in the UK this is the NaPTAN database) onto maps with a simulation engine for vehicle movements and traffic factors, such as slowing from peak passenger loading, and overlays of proposed or amended routes via imported GPX data with inputs for actual and envisaged timetables, stops, distance, loading, revenue and cost calculations.

These capabilities are available in other open-source software so it seems to me (though I am no programmer) that what is needed is their integration. The drag and drop interface of Transport Tycoon or its open-source version Open TTD enables almost anyone to model a transport network. What is needed is the capability to play these games with real network data such as distance, stops, speed and so on.

screenshot of Open TDD

There are already demonstrations of live time-table simulation on the web. Here is a visualisation of the trains running from Norwich.

There is an open-source platform for train timetabling and planning called Open Track which can produce train schedule graphs from text timetables.

Software maker Zircon takes these train graphs a step further with a tool for visualising timetable conflicts in 3D. Their website has a video demo.

Train Graph

A tool with these kinds of capabilities combined could answer the many 'what if' questions in public transport route planning that - because of complexity - is in the UK determined by commercial operators and statutory tendering. Communities would be able to visualise and cost local public transport provision for themselves and enabled to lobby for services and amendments and analyse solutions such as community transport and DRT with data from this modelling. The capability to 'predict and provide' and consider service innovations will not be in the hands of a few transport commissioners and private operators but will also be where it belongs; with the users.

Then, rather than pitting every village, town and parish against each other for a better service from the network provider, transport planning can be made collaborative; as each stakeholder will be able to work together and see how services to meet their needs would impact others and so more efficiently and fairly distribute the limited resources of statutory, commercial and charitable transport operators.

Incidentally, I put this suggestion into the Ordnance Survey Geovation Challenge and at one time it was in third place but a social media campaign ensured another idea secured more votes on the final day.

https://challenge.geovation.org.uk/a/dtd/Our-Big-Bus-Train-Modelling-Data-Set/108489-16422

If you know of any existing transport modelling tools, I'd be glad for any signposting to them via the comments form.