How two bus operators are tooling up for public transport’s data age. Is the bus sector due for an information overhaul?
While high-speed rail and urban metros often dominate the headlines, local buses remain Britain’s most-used form of public transport by passenger journeys. In the year ending March 2025, they accounted for about 4.1 billion of roughly 7 billion public transport journeys in Great Britain, or about 58%. England alone recorded 3.67 billion local-bus passenger journeys, equivalent to just over 10 million boardings a day on average.
Scale does not mean uniformity. Most local bus services outside London were deregulated from 1986, and the market now comprises three broad groups: a handful of large operators such as First Bus or Stagecoach, hundreds of independent operators and some municipal bus companies.
Among them, digital capability also varies. Maintenance, fuel and compliance information can still be spread across workshop systems, finance applications, spreadsheets and paper workflows, which creates delays when records have to be reconciled.
The age of compliance acronyms
Those fragmented records matter most when operators need to prove what happened, when it happened and what it cost.
The first pressure is compliance. The rules vary by geography, service and company size, but the direction is consistent: operators are expected to produce timely, auditable evidence from operational systems rather than reconstruct it after the fact. That turns fragmented maintenance, service and fleet data from an inconvenience into a compliance risk. The manual burden is different for each requirement.
Where data already originates in a structured source, the main challenge is usually integration. Real-time vehicle locations can come from automatic vehicle location feeds, while fuel and energy data can come from telematics. Digital tachograph data is similar for services that are actually in scope.
The harder cases are records that were never structured in the first place and metrics that must reconcile several sources. Maintenance history is a common example: a job card may sit on paper, parts consumption in one system and fault history in another. A metric such as CO₂ per passenger-mile also needs emissions or energy data to be combined with passenger and distance data. It can be useful for performance or reporting, but it is not a universal statutory metric for UK bus operators.
Beyond compliance, a matter of competitive standing
The second problem has a commercial consequence. Better records do not guarantee a stronger bid, but weak records make cost assumptions and performance claims harder to evidence.
An operator whose maintenance history sits across job cards and depot spreadsheets may have to reconstruct asset histories when an authority or auditor asks for evidence. At tender, the same operator has less reliable evidence for maintenance costs, availability and lifecycle-risk assumptions. The problem is not that the operator cannot price a bid at all; it is the quality and traceability of the evidence behind the price.
A mature EAM can help because it gives the operator asset-level cost, work and failure history in a consistent structure. That can support tender assumptions and evidence against contracted KPIs, provided the underlying data and processes are reliable.
Some operators use standards-based frameworks such as ISO 55001 to formalise asset management. Transdev is one example. It uses Octave Attune EAM to standardise asset-management processes and support ISO 55001 compliance.
Transdev had asset strategy processes that varied between operations and disparate systems with limited consistency. Attune EAM was introduced to centralise asset management for more than 400 buses maintained across three depots. The platform brings purchasing, pricing, parts management, maintenance scheduling, asset lifecycle, materials, works and procurement into one system.
Breaking the cycle: the Translink case
The Transdev example is not unique. Translink shows how the same record-management problem can persist inside a large public transport organisation.
Translink, Northern Ireland’s public transport operator, runs 12,500 services a day across a fleet of 1,400 buses, coaches and trains, with around 1.5 million passenger journeys each week. Before the Attune project, maintenance records were paper-based, driver inspections were manual and data submissions made timely reliability analysis more difficult.
Advances in equipment and telematics also created an opportunity for deeper analysis. The programme is exploring emissions monitoring built around roughly 20,000 sensor data points per vehicle, alongside predictive maintenance and AI analytics.
Translink selected Attune EAM with support from Progressive TSL. The platform manages work orders and captures asset costs, materials and schedules, with Power BI integration for analysis. The project is also extending mobile workflows, third-party integration and telematics capabilities.
The compliance benefit is more concrete. David Lowry, Translink’s Head of Fleet Systems, says audit evidence is now accessible in one place rather than requiring searches through filing cabinets.
The organisation is also exploring emissions monitoring, AI and predictive maintenance. The broader point is that EAM does not make compliance or tenders automatic. It gives operators a governed record of assets, work, cost and evidence that can be queried without rebuilding the story for every audit or bid.
Ready to replace disconnected maintenance records with a single asset-management system? Explore the Attune EAM overview or contact Octave to discuss what that could look like for your fleet.
- John Parker
- Senior Account Manager, EAM UK&I
- John.parker@octave.com
- +44 1793 492 587
https://www.octave.com/industries/transportation
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