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Passenger journeys carried each month by every public transport operator in Hong Kong, from the Transport Department's Monthly Traffic and Transport Digest: the franchised bus companies, the MTR lines, the Airport Express and Light Rail, the tram and the ferries.
Two listed companies sit behind it. MTR Corporation runs the railway, the Airport Express, Light Rail and its feeder buses in the north-west New Territories; Transport International Holdings owns Kowloon Motor Bus and Long Win Bus outright. Both report half-yearly, and the department publishes their patronage every month.
Request it for MTR Corporation and you get its journeys in total and for each line group separately, so airport traffic can be read apart from the domestic railway.
Available Data Points:
- Period Date: The period the value describes — what the number is about (the valid clock).
- Published At: When the value first became knowable — when the publisher released it (the knowledge clock). Filter on this for anything where look-ahead bias would matter.
- Value: The numeric value, where the series has one.
- Value Text: The textual value, for categorical series such as a trial's status or phase.
- Unit: Unit of the value, e.g.
vehicles,percent,USD. - Value Type:
number,percent,currency,countortext. - Frequency: How often the publisher releases the series.
- Market: The market the reading describes — an ISO-3166 alpha-2 code (
DE), a sub-national one (US-CA), a supranational aggregate (EA,EU) orGLOBAL. - Series Slug: Which series the reading belongs to. Unique within a publisher, not globally.
- Series Name: Human-readable name of the series.
- Source Slug: Publisher/feed identifier, e.g.
kba_registrations. - Source Name: Human-readable name of the publisher or feed.
- Publisher: Who publishes the underlying data.
- Entity Ref: The publisher's own identifier for what the reading is about — a manufacturer name, a securitisation trust, a reactor unit, a country code. Kept so any value can be traced back to the row it was parsed from.
Coverage
Monthly since January 2013, read from the DATA.GOV.HK edition of the digest, which permits commercial reuse with attribution to the Transport Department. Recent minibus, taxi and residents' bus months are provisional and are revised in later digests.
Only the two listed companies are mapped; Citybus, New Lantao Bus, the tram and the ferry companies are not. The Hong Kong total is stored as its own series but belongs to no listing, so this per-instrument route does not return it.
What to look for
Journeys are not revenue. A journey is one boarding, fares vary by operator and distance, and neither listed company earns its profit mainly from fares: MTR Corporation's largest earner is property, and Transport International's fares need government approval.
Read an operator as a patronage trend, and read the railway against the buses: the two compete for the same trips, so one gaining while the other falls is a shift in share rather than in demand. Compare a month with the same month a year earlier: Lunar New Year, typhoon days and the length of the month move every operator at once.
Two dates on every reading, and the difference is the edge
periodDate is what the number is about. publishedAt is when it first became knowable. The gap between them is the whole point of alternative data — and it is also the trap. A Form 10-D describing July is filed in mid-August, so a backtest that treats the period as the knowledge date reads a document six weeks before it existed.
from_date and to_date filter on periodDate, because that is the axis you plot against. Join on publishedAt when you are joining against returns.
Filtering: one market or all of them
Called with no filters, the endpoint returns every series in the dataset, for every market ORTEX covers it in. Each row names its own market, seriesSlug and sourceSlug, so a single request is enough to chart the whole dataset.
Narrow it with any combination of market (one market), series (one measure) and source (one publisher). Filter values that are each valid but select nothing together return 400 invalidSelection rather than a misleading empty result.
Raw readings here; comparable ones next door
This endpoint serves the publisher's numbers. Raw values are frequently not comparable — receivables of $10.9bn against $4.9bn say nothing without each book's size, and a 5.3% charge-off rate means something different on a subprime book than a prime one. The Alt Data signals endpoint serves the same series as percentiles and z-scores against a stated comparison set, which is the form a screen or a backtest wants.
Why a company you expect may be missing
Three reasons, and none of them is a bug:
- The dataset is a window, not a census: Several of these publishers release a rolling window rather than a complete history.
- The filer is not the listed company: Registers name a marque, a charter or a trust. ORTEX maps those to the listed parent where the link is defensible and leaves them unmapped where it is not — a wrong mapping silently attributes another company's data to your ticker.
- The population is genuinely narrow: Not every listed company appears in every register, and no amount of mapping changes that.
How much history there is
Several of these publishers overwrite their own pages and keep no archive. Where that is so, the series begins on the day ORTEX started capturing it and lengthens from there — nobody, including the publisher, can supply the days before that. Everything ORTEX has ever fetched is archived on capture, so the series only ever grows.
Try it out! You can test the API with the trial key TEST. Simply include it in your request headers; either here, or add the header "Ortex-Api-Key": "TEST" to your http request.
Trial key restrictions: Trial keys may be limited to a specific date range and set of regions. Requests outside the allowed regions or entirely outside the allowed date range are rejected; a date window that partially overlaps the allowed range is trimmed to it, reported in meta.restriction.
Get full access! Get a key at app.ortex.com/apis