NeTEx can help to reduce complexity at the design level in that it is based on Transmodel, using a well-established set of well-defined concepts with an official terminology set in different European languages. Careful abstracted to separate different design concerns. For example NeTEx separates out the concepts of a route (a sequence of possible stops), a journey pattern (a specific set of stops on the route), the timings to traverse the links of the journey pattern, and the resulting passing times at the stop making up a given timetabled journey, thereby allowing many different journeys to be computed simply by specifying a starting time, As a result of this approach, NeTEx achieves a high degree of reuse, using the same core elements in all three parts and building Part 3 from part2, and Part 2 from Part 2 elements, reducing the overall number of elements needed. A small number of design patterns are used very consistently reducing the overall cognitive burden needed to understand a large number of different functional areas.

The existence of high level models with transforms to the detailed implementation gives developers a full documented overview of the design, making it easier to understand the purpose of specific components and to assess the impact of changes.

NeTEx can help to reduce complexity at the implementation level in that it takes a uniform approach to many common aspects of data handling, for example, versioning, data frames, data identifiers, validity conditions, etc, greatly simplifying the implementation of such features and allowing a high degree of code reuse for common services. NeTEx includes explicit mechanisms to allow the continuous, repeated large scale integration of data from different sources as is found in modern internet based environments.