OpenStreetMap
Edinburgh buses maps etc + Scottish pies tomorrow
Posted by Harry Wood on 5 January 2011 in English.I spent new year up in Edinburgh. The Hogmanay was quite good, but personally I was more impressed by the loony dook. This all took my mind off work... sometimes.
We did quite a bit of travelling by bus, and being entirely unfamiliar with the bus routes, various aspects of this were quite a struggle in an interesting geo kind of way. At placr I've spent some time untangling London bus schedule XML structures. Here's a sneak preview of some output bus timetables. It feels like quite an achievement to actually manage to produce timetables from these files, but I've got some more work to do to output them in more query-able dynamic ways and useful formats. So anyway, some information like that might've been useful while travelling around Edinburgh (we only have London data at the moment)
Mostly though I found myself wanting maps. Why do bus stops often not have maps? I always imagined this might be because transport companies have to pay for costly licenses to display maps to the public. I'm not sure if that is the reason, but if it is, I've got a little hint for these people: OpenStreetMap.org. ...you should check it out.
I pondered these things while sitting waiting for buses in the cold. I also fiddled with my android phone, and pondered ways in which this low-bandwidth fat-fingered browser-incompatible experience sucked. What I really needed on various occasions, was the öpnvkarte.de view of Edinburgh. In a mobile browser I was stuck fingering a non-draggable OpenLayers view of German buses. I hoped it might be available as a layer in some other app, but didn't find it (anyone know?) This gave me some ideas for building simple mobile map interfaces. For example, in this situation a static image view of Edinburgh bus routes would've been enough. I was also trying to remember an old tweet from https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/chrisfl. Looks like "bustracker" would've been super-useful (although using inferior maps for some reason)
We can go off and think about these higher-level application problems thanks to the hard work of Edinburgh mappers. I think I've said before that they've mapped the city beautifully. A pleasure to use for pedestrian routing around the little back alleyways in the old town centre:
I also like the way the steep approach up Arthur's seat is mapped (they really are steps!) I wonder how the 7th series map of the hill will compare, with it's nice contours (not scanned yet)
This rambling on Scottish matters, is a mere pretext to the important topic of little Scottish pies.
The next London OSM pub meet-up will be at the Daniel Gooch on tomorrow night!
...And this is a pub we've been to before. It's a self-indulgent pub choice to give me a little taste of the holiday I've just had. I think the landlord is Scottish and I'll be very disappointed if they're not serving the little Scottish pies they did last time. It's probably also a good place for me to get rid of that funny Scottish money I have in my wallet. See you tomorrow?
Discussion
Comment from LivingWithDragons on 5 January 2011 at 11:09
I understand how it's helpful to see a map, so one can decide if another route goes just as close to my destination, where one could get to on buses from where they are, or where they'll see the bus and know to run to the stop to catch it.
It's a great shame that OpenBusMap/öpnvkarte hasn't updated since the summer. I'm quite motivated to map bus routes for the reasons above, but I would be even more so if I could see my work appear and see where sections/routes were missing.
Also, if it was updated then I would be up for contacting the local bus comapny (Arriva I think) and saying if they give me a 1 or 2 day passes free I will spend that time mapping all the routes.
Comment from smsm1 on 5 January 2011 at 12:01
All of the Lothian Buses timetables are available online in PDF format, which is unlikely to be easily parsed. The PDFs do have all the road names that the bus routes go down. It may be worth contacting them, as they have a very good customer service department.
Comment from Tom Chance on 5 January 2011 at 12:40
Harry, any plans to also parse the bus route data released by TfL for OpenStreetMap? We have pretty patchy coverage at the moment, and, as Gregory notes, only an out-of-date render for end users.
Comment from janus4 on 5 January 2011 at 14:20
Ok, its not OSM but for an android maybe Öffi is a good application.
Greetings
Comment from chriscf on 6 January 2011 at 00:43
The openptmap method seems to work nicely - though the stylesheets aren't provided. I've not tried asking the author yet, though here is a small-scale test with a very basic stylesheet based on partial transparency. I have this in a small area (not much more than that imaage depicts) using a stripped-down dataset. Have some plans, but main obstacles are lack of resources and compiling the stylesheets (I'm frankly amazed anyone's had the patience to get the main OSM stylesheet to where it is).