Take this on
A working system, looking for someone to run it as a Community Interest Company.
Co-founder opportunity — transit mapping CIC
We have built a system that produces clear, accurate bus maps for a town or a single place, for print and for the web — and, more to the point, keeps them right as services change. A design agency can draw the first edition for a few hundred pounds; what it charges by the hour for every edition after is the thing this takes out. That second half is what is missing: most small towns have no single map showing every operator's buses, and the few that do have one that is out of date.
We are looking for an entrepreneurial individual or a small team to take it on and run it as a standalone Community Interest Company.
What comes with it: the whole working system, source-available and converting to fully open-source in 2030; a documented way of producing and maintaining maps; a clear social mission in public-transport access and digital inclusion; and five identified buyer classes — councils, NHS and campus estates, science parks, BIDs and tourism bodies, and independent bus operators — so commercial buyers can cross-subsidise a low rate for community transport rather than the whole thing depending on one stretched public budget. What does not come with it is a set of instructions about how to run it — the business model, the funding, and who to sell to first would be yours to shape. Two things did change in 2026 and are worth knowing before that shaping starts: council bus money is now a multi-year formula allocation rather than an annual bid, which makes a recurring retainer arguable in a way it was not; and the Bus Services Act 2025 brought franchising within reach of every authority and let councils run buses again, which sharpens the case for independent operators to look professional.
Why now. Two statutory deadlines fall within a day of each other for all 79 English local transport authorities: every Enhanced Partnership plan must be updated to reflect the new measures by 31 March 2027, and each authority must have consulted on and published its first bus network accessibility plan — which assesses bus stop infrastructure and explicitly includes rural stops — by 1 April 2027. Separately, the Enhanced Partnership statutory guidance republished on 1 April 2026 lets a scheme require a single set of multi-operator information available across all operators. One clear map showing every operator's buses for a place is among the few things that answers both — and nothing in national policy says whose job it is to make them. The DfT's own guidance on the accessibility plan, published 28 August 2026, goes further for the guide that sits beside it: it says every authority should offer that guide — a summary of accessibility features and commitments, not a bus map — as “an accessible website and a hard-copy leaflet available on vehicles, travel offices, at transport interchanges and council offices, to reach as many disabled passengers as possible.” A printed map drawn from the same stop and service data belongs beside that guide.
Interested in closing the transport-information gap? info@busmaps.uk.
What the asset actually is
Stated concretely, because this is the part that decides whether the above is an opportunity or a wish. Everything here exists and runs today.
A working engine
Eight towns and twelve individual places have been built with it, from a small market town to High Wycombe — twenty maps, of which eighteen are published on this site; the other two are boarding plans for a single stop, which we build to order rather than publish. It is deterministic: the same data always produces the same map, byte for byte, with no network and no AI at drawing time — which is what makes a print file reproducible a year later.
A gate that prices the job first
Every area is scored before the expensive work starts — how many lines, how tightly they bunch, how much of the network would end up hidden — and returns green, amber or red, with a documented ladder of remedies for a red one. Very few small suppliers can tell a customer how hard their town is before quoting.
A portal, not a folder of files
Self-serve editing inside a safe subset, three approval gates (organisation, map request, publication review) and a monthly maintenance cycle where the customer sees the change, previews it and accepts it. The recurring half is the product; the one-off map is what everyone else sells.
Documented to be handed over
An operations handbook and six runbooks — create a map, onboard a customer, review and publish, run the monthly cycle, handle messages, handle an incident — plus a developer guide and a deploy runbook that includes the restore procedure step by step, which is the part usually missing.
Source-available, with a path to open
The codebase and its full history are readable and auditable by a successor today — not something they have to be given from scratch. It's licensed under the Business Source License, which converts automatically to Apache-2.0 in 2030: independence that becomes contractual now and unconditional later, once the commercial position it protects no longer needs shielding.
Built on open data
Bus services from the UK Bus Open Data Service (Open Government Licence); streets and landmarks from OpenStreetMap (ODbL, attributed on every map). No licensed dataset to re-negotiate, and no supplier who can switch the input off.
Why a CIC, and not a startup
The mission comes first, and it has to stay first
The organisations that most need a bus map — parish councils, community transport, small market towns — are the ones least able to pay for one. The organisations that can pay comfortably are science parks, hospital campuses and business districts. A CIC lets the second group cross-subsidise the first as a matter of governance rather than goodwill, and the asset lock means that cannot quietly be reversed later.
It also makes the selling easier
Council procurement has to weigh social value, and a CIC makes that part of the evaluation easy to answer: the social objective is a matter of registration rather than a claim in a tender document. It also opens grant and foundation funding that a sole trader simply cannot apply for. The legal form is not a compromise here; it is the better commercial fit.
Who would suit it
Background
A commercial or business-development generalist comfortable moving between public and private buyers fits better than a single-sector specialist. Sustainable transport, GIS and mapping, civic tech, facilities and estates management, NHS sustainability, or BID/town-centre management backgrounds all fit. You do not need to have written the software, or even to read it — but you do need to understand how it is developed and maintained using AI, or to have someone who does. What happens to that if I'm no longer the one doing it is covered in "The honest bit", right.
Shape
An individual or a small team. The hard part is not the code, it is knowing which of the five buyer classes — councils, NHS/campus estates, science parks, BIDs and tourism, and independent bus operators — to knock on first, and in what order.
The honest bit
This is a one-person project today. Succession is exactly the problem being solved — a map that is only maintained while one person keeps maintaining it is not really maintained. Knowing that going in matters more than any skill on this list.
What is not resolved
Listed here rather than raised on a second call, because a serious candidate will find them anyway and both of us would have wasted the time.
The entity itself is undecided
This page describes what a CIC could be handed. There is no CIC yet, and no decision has been taken between incorporating one and running the same thing as a small commercial supplier. That is genuinely open — and it means an incoming founder would be shaping the answer rather than inheriting it.
There is a third thing worth saying plainly: there are no customers yet. The system is a pilot and every organisation and map on this site is our own, labelled as such. What is proven is that the thing works and can be run; what is not proven is that anyone will pay for it.
Who else does this
There is a trade that draws bus maps, and it is good at it. Cartography firms draw whole-network maps by hand for transport authorities, in programmes whose contract ceilings run from about £50,000 to £100,000: West Yorkshire's bus-map tool in 2017 was £52,000, West Northamptonshire's customer-information programme in 2024 was £70,000, and Transport for Wales's schematic maps in 2026 were £79,680, all on the public record. Inside the West Northamptonshire programme the supplier's own itemised estimate prices a schematic map of a market town at £970, and updating at £6,600 for two weeks of work, about £88 an hour. So the map is not expensive; keeping it right is. Nobody in that trade generates the map from the open-data feed, and nobody sells to a parish or a bus users' group: the customer is the authority and the product is an edition. Closer to home, the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority commissioned a hand-drawn whole-network poster in early 2025, on which each town is a node. A pitch to an authority has to say what a town map adds to the map it already paid for.
Sources: West Yorkshire Combined Authority, Bus Map Tool, Contracts Finder, 2017; West Northamptonshire Council, improvements to customer information, Contracts Finder, 2024 (the itemised estimate is the notice's attachment); Transport for Wales, Welsh Bus Network Plan schematic maps, Find a Tender, 2026; Human Transit, June 2025 for the county poster. All open in a new tab.
Talk to us
A first conversation costs nothing and can be short. If it goes further there is more to show than is on this page — how the work is actually costed, what a map takes to make and to maintain, and what the market looks like — which is a conversation rather than a web page.
info@busmaps.uk — or use the contact form and say it is about the CIC.