The problem
The Department for Transport discontinued Journey Time Statistics in March 2025, concluding there was "not a sufficient business case to continue production." The last data year was 2019. But it did not leave a vacuum — it shipped the Connectivity Tool Lite, free, covering England and Wales across roughly 15 million 100m grid squares, six travel purposes and four modes. That is a serious public tool, and any proposal claiming the government publishes nothing here is wrong.
The gap is narrower and much sharper than "no accessibility statistic". It is stated in the tool’s own documentation: the model "assumes that all timetables are adhered to… will make areas with unreliable services appear more connected than they are." It also excludes fares and congestion, and rests on travel behaviour data from 2011–2020 that does not capture post-pandemic change.
So the official measure systematically flatters exactly the places that are worst served. A neighbourhood with an hourly bus that arrives two times in three scores identically to one where it always arrives. Unreliability is invisible by construction, and it is concentrated in the same areas as deprivation and low car ownership.
The consequences are not abstract. Bus journeys outside London fell from 4.6 billion in 2009 to 3.6 billion in 2024, a 21.7% reduction; more than 10,500 services were withdrawn between 2019 and 2024; and CPRE finds 56% of small towns in the South West and North East are transport deserts or at risk of becoming one.
What makes the fix newly possible is that the Bus Open Data Service is legally mandated and publishes real-time vehicle positions alongside timetables from 250+ operators. The difference between the two is measurable, continuously, at national scale — and nobody is measuring it.
The system
Waypoint rebuilds genuine door-to-service journey time measurement from Bus Open Data timetables, and then does what the discontinued statistic never could: recomputes continuously rather than annually.
That single change transforms the product. Under the old regime a route withdrawal became visible in a statistic published up to two years later. With mandated open timetable data, a withdrawal shows up as a measured accessibility loss within days — and Waypoint publishes the delta: which neighbourhoods lost access to which class of service this quarter, and how many people live there.
It layers the 2025 deprivation indices to produce a defensible, published definition of a transport desert tied to deprivation and car availability, replacing the ad-hoc definitions currently in circulation with something a minister can quote and a council can plan against.
It is also the analysis that mayoral authorities currently buy from consultants to build bus franchising business cases. Building it once as a public asset removes a recurring cost from every authority pursuing franchising under the Bus Services Act.
Data foundation
Every dataset below is open, or its access constraint is stated
| Dataset | Publisher | What it provides |
|---|---|---|
| Bus Open Data Service (BODS) | DfT | Legally mandated timetables, fares and real-time location from 250+ operators. Obligations commenced 2021 and 2023. |
| NaPTAN | DfT | National public transport access nodes — every stop in Great Britain. |
| OS Open Roads | Ordnance Survey | Free network data for walk-access and interchange modelling. |
| Census 2021 | ONS | Population, car availability and small-area demographics. Note travel-to-work variables are pandemic-affected. |
| Indices of Deprivation 2025 | MHCLG | Published October 2025, replacing the 2019 indices most existing analysis still uses. |
| NHS Organisation Data Service | NHS England | Hospital, GP and pharmacy locations as destinations. |
| Get Information About Schools | DfE | School locations as destinations. |
Capabilities
Benefits
For government
- Restores a capability DfT retired for cost reasons, at a fraction of the original cost, using data that is already mandated and free.
- Supports Bus Services Act implementation and the roughly £900m a year of bus funding by showing where it changes access and where it does not.
- Gives DWP evidence on jobcentre accessibility, which bears directly on claimant conditionality decisions.
- Provides the accessibility evidence base for the devolution agenda, where mayoral authorities are taking on transport powers without comparable data.
For the public
- People can see, before moving or taking a job, whether they can actually reach it without a car.
- Communities losing services get measured evidence rather than anecdote when they challenge withdrawals.
- Investment targeted at the places where access is genuinely worst, rather than where lobbying is loudest.
Delivery
Phasing
Risks & mitigations
Jobcentre and retail locations are the weak link; food store data of usable quality is commercial. Scope begins with health, education and employment centres where open data exists, and states coverage honestly.
Operator compliance varies. Coverage is published as a metric rather than assumed, and gaps are reported back to DfT as a by-product.
Transport for the North’s social exclusion tool covers related ground. Waypoint differentiates on continuous recomputation, change deltas and national coverage.
Sources
All sources checked in August 2026. Figures carry the reference period of their source, which may differ from publication date. Where a figure could not be verified against a primary source it is not used.