[Talk-ca] TransLink mapping party Vancouver?

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood ducky at webfoot.com
Thu Sep 17 17:52:31 BST 2009


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.

So no party needed if this guy comes through.

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Kaitlin Duck Sherwood <ducky at webfoot.com>wrote:

> 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?
>
>

-- 
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
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