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The traveline Concordat that each region has signed requires Bank Holiday services to be on the regional database two weeks before the Bank Holiday. Some Traveline regions try to get their data in place earlier in December because enquiries for Christmas services start from the beginning of December.
In England and Wales the bus registration regulations only require operators to give 21 days notice of the changes. This is not sufficient notice for traveline to process the data and so meeting the Concordat requirements is dependent upon having good cooperation with bus operators and local authority contracting departments to encourage them to decide well in advance on what levels of service they are going to operate. Operators may be trying to wait to see when shops are going to open and what sports events will be taking place. However if they delay their services may not be properly publicised.
In Scotland the bus registration regulations require that full notice (56 days) is given of Christmas and New Year changes and these are often included in the main registration of the service.
Many regions alter their data in advance of receiving final confirmation from operators. This enables the journey planner to give a better indication of the levels of service that will operate and is refined if and when more precise information is received.
Obviously Christmas Day and New Year's Day fall on different days of the week each year and this means that the exact pattern of alterations varies and this influences the way that the data will be enterred into the timetable data systems.
In 2006 Christmas Day and New Year's Day fall on a Monday which is one of the more straightforward patterns to deal with. This is one way to view it:
Different systems operate in different ways. The TransXchange data structure enables journeys to be individually dated and share journey pattern data that describes the route. This can reduce the size of the data that otherwise can grow very considerably over the Christmas/New Year period.
Some systems provide a table so that the revised pattern of service can be listed for each route and each day.
The position of data in each region prior to the Christmas and New Year period is given on Transport Direct.
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© traveline 2008, Last updated: 25 September 2008