Electronic decisions for public transport lines

Abstract

Public transport services in Austria require a license of the provincial administration for the lines and stops. The administration checks whether the public transport service is compatible with the road infrastructure and the traffic conditions. The stops must conform to common standards and to the safety requirements according to estimated use.
The Graph Integration Platform (GIP) is a common geographic reference system for traffic and transport infrastructure in Austria. It is now fully functional, constantly up-to-date and available in very good accuracy all over the country. Several administrative procedures have been converted to computer assisted processes and based on the common reference graph. The licenses for public transport are relevant for the administration of the province and for the public transport associations that procure public transport operation from private operators, promote the services and sell the tickets. The effort to match the schedules for public transport with the legal licenses issued by the administration was prohibitive in the past.
The licenses in all nine Austrian provinces are based on the same federal law. Nevertheless, there are substantial differences between procedures applied in the provinces. The progress of digitalization also differs: some provinces use text processor (mostly MS Word) others use administrative document management systems as a standard. Different approaches were discussed with the people in charge of the federally funded project GIP E-II. Finally, a prototype that would fit the requirements and procedures of the administration in Lower Austria and Burgenland was developed. Care had been taken, that the additional requirements of other provinces can easily be incorporated into a future version. The public transport schedule maintained by the public transport association was compared with the digitally available data in the provinces and became the basis for a basic data set to start with. As the bus lines are tendered by the traffic association in regular intervals, a fully up-to-date version of the licenses will be part of the system by 2020.