Concerning that most of the
carbon emissions of transport and most of the energy consumption caused by road
transport, Helsinki Region Transport
(HSL) considered
that the reduction of car driving and the increase of use of public transport,
walking, cycling and car sharing are urgent needs. In this direction, HSL has
planned the development of the Helsinki
Region Transport System Plan (HLJ).
HSL is a joint local
authority, consists of seven member municipalities – Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa,
Kauniainen, Kerava, Kirkkonummi and Sipoo – which started its operations in
2010. HSL made the use of public transport attractive to commuters, as 345
million journeys are accomplished according to its services.
The organisation of public
transport and the improvement of its operation conditions, the development of
travel fare and ticketing system, the provision of transport and passenger
information and the organisation of tickets sales and tickets inspections are
the main operations of HLJ. Despite all these useful operations, HSL’s most
remarkable achievement is its “open” policy in data and applications (APIs),
and its new open journey planner feature.
Regarding open data and APIs,
everyone is able to have free access in HSL’s transport data interfaces for
applications and services, which support public transport usage and transport
information, by creating a free HSL account. The open APIs are HSL
Journey Planner API, HSL live API, Kalkati.net XML database dump and GTFS
database dump. Additionally, the distribution and the re – use of open data is
allowed. Furthermore, as the commuters’ needs are getting more exigent, HSL has
invested on IBM’s Message Sight product in order to provide real time traffic
data.
Moreover and regarding the new
open journey planner (JP), it is a mobile application that is planned to be
released on March 1st, 2016. It will provide guidance during the journey and
its operations will be based on real time traffic data. The use of real time
traffic data could affect the routing results according to the current traffic
situation in order to provide the best transport solution. The development of
the open JP is being accomplished with the contribution of the Finnish
Transport Agency and its coverage range will be national.
As well as HSL’s services,
GYM’s platform and its services will be accessible free to everyone and the
data will be also open. This important feature will contribute to the
cooperation with other JP providers across EU and will lead to the Pan –
European character of GYM platform.
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