Belay that request. I talked to someone last night who said that he had the geocoded bus stop locations (with the stop numbers). He is going to get in touch with Carson and open-source the data.<br><br>So no party needed if this guy comes through.<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Kaitlin Duck Sherwood <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ducky@webfoot.com">ducky@webfoot.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi -- <br><br>There is a young man named <span>Carson</span> who put together a quite lovely site scraping info from Translink's site (the Vancouver bus system) and repackaging it in a much more usable form:<br>
<a href="http://www.transitdb.ca/" target="_blank">http://www.transitdb.ca/</a><br>
(Translink is the transit system for the lower mainland.)<br><br><span>Carson</span>
has been keeping a very low profile because some third party asserts
ownership of the geolocation of all the bus stops. Seems to me that we
should organize a mapping party to just go get the bus stop locations
and numbers and put them into the public domain so that people like <span>Carson</span> can do their work unfettered. <br>
<br>Thinking about it some more, we might be able to get a rough estimate of locations from the Vancouver street map data and the names of the streets at the intersections: if we assume that the bus always stops on the far side of the intersection (almost always true for Vancouver), then we could calculate one bus length, right hand side of the street, and get pretty close. (Closer than many GPS waypoints!)<br>
<br>What would be missing from that is the bus stop numbers. (In Vancouver, all bus stops have a five-digit number painted on the sign to identify it uniquely. This is used both in the API and in other services, for example you can SMS 33333 and give it the stop number, and then it will message you back with when the next buses will arrive.)<br>
<br>I have never organized a mapping party and barely have a GPS myself (hubby has one), though I do a lot with maps mashups. Can you-plural give me advice on how I could harness the enthusiasm of crowds?<br><br></blockquote>
</div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Kaitlin Duck Sherwood<br>