[Tagging] Public Transport Timetables

[Paul Allen]

On Thu, Nov 8, 2018 at 9:27 PM Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> FWIW I've just used https://www.traveline.info/ to find journey between
> Porthmadog and Criccieth and Bearsden and Milton of Campsie (yes!  There
> are ones at this time of night!) so the main site does  indeed work in
> Wales and Scotland.
>

Yes, it works.  But it doesn't have an option to use Cymraeg.  Which would
be a show-stopper
for some people in Wales, who would rather use a site that is completely
broken if it is in
Welsh rather than a site that works but is only available in English.

Also, the .cymru site has something the .info site does not, route maps.
I just pulled up a local
route and looked at its map.  Admittedly it is a very weird and complicated
route (reminiscent of
a spider web on drugs), but this route map gets it wrong in many, many ways:
https://www.traveline.cymru/timetables/?routeNum=408&direction_id=0&timetable_key=408MFRBA1

Kinda reminds me of a Google bus route I looked at several years ago which
apparently drew straight
lines (through houses and across fields) between timetabled stops rather
than following a road between
them.  Told me to get to a location on the actual bus route by getting off
a mile beyond and walking
back because it had joined the stops with straight lines through fields.
It was only by playing around
that I got it to show the route it was using, which at one point ploughed
through the middle of a small
housing estate and took a straight line across farmland to the next
timetabled stop.


> Other than Traveline, plenty of other OSMers* have worked in the transport
> / route planning area - both "startups" and more traditional transport
> authorities.  I know of others have looked at consuming GTFS for bus routes
> in England, and found that it can be a bit complicated as the same numbered
> route can exist multiple times in the GTFS feed with only minor differences
> for the variations - it's not just a simple case of "grab all that data
> from there and use it" unless you're prepared to do quite a bit of
> processing.  You really need to be an app to do anything useful with the
> data (such as https://oeffi.schildbach.de/index.html - which works
> everywhere in GB that I've tried it and presumably uses Traveline's feeds,
> or something similar) - anything else would just be "reinventing GTFS".
>

So what's the copyright situation with Traveline's GTFS feeds?  Are we free
to use any of them to add
routes to OSM?  Obviously, they'd have to be sanity-checked...

-- 
Paul
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