§ Lord Bradshawasked Her Majesty's Government:
What are (a) the current budget; and (b) the emerging costs of Transport Direct; and when they expect that the system will be available for public use. [HL4113]
186WA
§ Lord Davies of Oldham£51 million capital funding has been allocated to the Transport Direct programme:
Development of the portal—£27 million. This comprises: contract costs—£17 million; hardware—£0.5 million; data—£4.5 million: project costs—£5 million.
The remainder will be spent on future enhancements to the portal, including delivery through other media; development of the JourneyWeb protocol (that allows different systems to communicate with each other); development of internationally recognised technical standards; further development of real-time information; publicity and marketing.
The £51 million capital funding was allocated to Transport Direct in the Spending Review 2002 covering the period April 2003 to March 2006. Capital prior to this was in the region of £2.5 million and revenue costs were approximately £1 million.
The Transport Direct site was first made available to the public, as a trial version, on 12 July 2004. Currently, further testing is being undertaken and initial user feedback is being gauged. The official launch of the first full version of the Transport Direct site is expected to take place within the next few months.
Lord Berkeleyasked Her Majesty's Government:
Further to the Written Answer by the Lord Davies of Oldham on 22 July (WA 77) which stated that the Transport Direct website went live on 12 July—(a) why there is no link between this site and the Department for Transport's website; and (b) where on the Transport Direct website the various categories of information described by the Minister can be found. [HL4114]
§ Lord Davies of Oldham
- (a) In order to allow further testing to take place and also to gauge initial user feedback, Transport Direct is currently running a trial version of the website. As a result, publicity, including links from other sites, is being limited until the first full version is officially launched. This official launch is expected to take place within the next few months.
- (b) The functions available on the Transport Direct website are divided into three principal categories: "Journey Planner", "Mapping" and "Live Travel", all of which are very easy to access from the site's homepage.
The "Live Travel" category gives information on real-time information for all rail stations in Great Britain, live travel news that shows incidents that occur and a service that notifies users of disruptions to their journey. The "Journey Planner" category allows the user to plan their journey. Every answer shown for car journey searches will take into account historical congestion data for the given route.