[Talk-ca] TransLink mapping party Vancouver?

[Kaitlin Duck Sherwood]

Hi --

There is a young man named Carson 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:
   http://www.transitdb.ca/
(Translink is the transit system for the lower mainland.)

Carson 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 Carson can
do their work unfettered.

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!)

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.)

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?

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Sam Vekemans
<acrosscanadatrails at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
> unfortunatly i got this message too late.
> I was in Vancouver on the weekend.
> Please join the talk-ca at openstreetmap.org mailing list, as it would be
> great to have members of OSGeoBC join in.
>
> Its great to hear about TransLink, and i'm happy to help.
> I have many questions & and probably some answers too :)
>
> in November, i'm planning on hosting a 'mapping
> party/workshop/discussion', in vancouver were by that time, this
> Canada Import should be more underway.
>
> Look forward to hearing from you all soon.
>
> Sam
>
> p.s just as the talk-ca list has no context for this message (about
> translink), osgeo-bc has no context about the import progress & my
> hopes for importing & dealing with proper attribution.
> :-) ... As well as talk about an OpenStreetMap Canada chapter :)
>
> --
> Twitter: @Acrosscanada
> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sam.vekemans
>
>
> --
> Twitter: @Acrosscanada
> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sam.vekemans
>



-- 
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
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