[talk-au] NSW Transport Transport Data Exchange

Andrew Harvey andrew.harvey4 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 5 12:36:09 BST 2012


[This post is dual posted because it may be of interest to both
communities.]

I've been looking into the NSW Transport transport data exchange program
recently, and I'm providing a summary of what I've learnt.

# About
The TDX program is an effort by NSW Transport to open up transport data.
This includes train, light rail, bus and ferry routes and timetables.

# Delivery Formats
There are two feeds of the data. The General Transit Feed Specification
(GTFS) and the TransXchange feed. The short is GTFS is a csv style
format pushed by Google, and TransXchange is an xml style format which
came out of similar UK open data efforts.

I couldn't find public feeds of the TDX data in the GTFS format, but
they will likely come soon and/or be republished though a Google API.

It seems that the TransXchange is the main format being published as
part of the TDX and any release of the data in the GTFS will be
secondary derived products. For this reason (and since you can convert
from TransXchange to GTFS) I have based all my work on the original
TransXchange data from the TDX program.

# Accessing the data
Transport NSW don't have a public feed of the TDX data. You must submit
a request through to them, and then they will issue you access to a
portal where you can access the data (data dumps). I have requested
access and I'm mirroring (and plan to keep updated) the TransXchange
data from the TDX at
http://tianjara.net/data/tdx.nsw.gov.au/

My replication scripts I use to pull the data from Transport NSW and
publish it on my site are at https://gist.github.com/3620564

# License
As part the license agreement I have with Transport NSW, the data is
provided to me under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia license.

From what I've read the Transport NSW folks don't want to see TDX data
being used without attribution or out of data data being presented as
current.

There is a long history here, as they have cycled through several
different approaches from the its our data you can't have it approach to
the we will let you use the data only if we approve your use of it to
CC-BY SA with additional clauses, to finally CC-BY.

# Relevance to OSM
There is an overlap between what data OSM can contain and what data is
provided by the TDX program.

stop locations (mapped in OSM + provided by TDX)
transit routes (mapped in OSM ; provided by TDX as series of stops, not
the complete route between stops)
transit timetable (out of scope for OSM ; provided by TDX)

I have no comment about mass imports at this time, but I am interested in:
a) providing the TDX data as .osm files so contributors can compare or
use the data as a guide for helping out their OSM mapping of these
features (eg find where OSM is missing data, or has incorrect data)
b) potentially providing links between the TDX data and OSM data (so you
can match up existing transit stop nodes/ways/relations in OSM with the
TDX data)

Regarding a) I have had great success using
transxchange2GoogleTransit.jar to convert the TransXchange into GTFS
style data, and subsequently using my stops2osm.pl
https://gist.github.com/3635081 script to convert this into a .osm file.

Example here
http://tianjara.net/data/tdx.nsw.gov.au/osm-extract/20120830/stops.tar.xz (yes
I know I have train stations as bus_stops...)

It is important to note that this data isn't static, and any changes to
routes will be reflected by updates to this data in the feed (well that
is what they say, we'll see).

# External References
http://www.131500.com.au/transport-data-exchange-program

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