Verkehrs- und Tarifverbund Stuttgart (VVS)

Platform: Verkehrs- und Tarifverbund Stuttgart (VVS)
Coverage area: The network area includes the city of Stuttgart and four neighbouring counties – Böblingen, Esslingen, Ludwigsburg and Rems-Murr-Kreis – with a total of just over 3,000 square kilometers and 2.4 million inhabitants.

Stakeholders:

Organisation and management: VSS is an association owned by: (i) Stuttgart Local Authority and authorities of 4 districts around Stuttgart (50%) and (ii) bus and train operators in the area (50%). VSS main roles: (i) organise common fare system; (ii) design public transport schedule; (iii) manage the journey planning platform.

Source of funding:

Initial investment:

Development history:

Modes of transport included: subway, commuter trains, bus

Service Features: Static timetable of public transport. Real-time data on commuter trains. Tariff information is also integrated into the platform. VSS recently developed a separate platform for bike journey planning.

Source of data: VSS is directly responsible for the static timetable of public transport and hence includes this data directly into its platform. Real-time data on commuter trains comes from operators.

Data flow:

Open data policy: Data is currently open to third parties only through a contractual agreement that imposes two main conditions to data receivers: request must come from a real person and no statistic use of the data can be made. MOOVEL, owned by Daimler (https://www.moovel.com/en/NL), for instance, uses VSS database. Tendency is that the use of these contracts will be discontinued – VSS is moving towards fully open data.

Continuity:

Miscellaneous: Currently VSS does not make any other use of the data gathered for the journey planning platform. VSS does not nudge users to any behaviour – platform simply provides travel information for public transport users. At the moment users have no role nor provide policy rich feedback. There will be news in relation to users participation in the coming months.