[OSM-talk] London Underground stations?

[Tom Carden]

On 03/07/06, SteveC <steve at asklater.com> wrote:
> * @ 03/07/06 01:24:57 PM noodles at earth.li wrote:
> > it
> > occurred to me that OSM is an ideal method of recording tube station
> > locations (and probably even a large amount of track given it's above
> > ground). Is anyone working on this already?
>
> Yeah, and Tom'll have lots to say on this.
>

Well, not lots but some!  AFAIK the things that have been subject to
take-downs are things that were using modified official tube maps or
using the tube roundel trademark in some way.  I'm not in favour of it
and it's crappy that the underground thinks this is worth pursuing in
a serious way, but it's kind of understandable.

> I started collecting locations on my osm wiki user page when I found out
> the wikicommons data is all derived from google maps.
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/User:Steve
>

My own experiments were all with the wikicommons data set, and I was
really disappointed to find it was traced from Google Maps.

A two-pronged approach is in order:
* as Steve already is, collect the data ourselves using GPS, out of
copyright maps and (appropriately licensed) satellite and aerial
photography.  This could probably be completed in a day by a few
dedicated individuals!
* lobby for a freely available official data set including station
locations, travel times, connectivity, interchange times, etc. since I
don't think it can hurt TfL for its customers to make their own maps.

Longer term, like Richard I would like to see a geodata license which
expressly permits geocoding of isolated points of interest.
<far-off-fantasy>If Google and others were to adopt this license it
would be a huge weight off a lot of people's minds and make the status
of several large Google-Maps derived databases
unambiguous</far-off-fantasy>.  Here's hoping.

But yes, in the mean-time please start collecting it.  Nick, does your
new renderer have an icon for tube stops, and a suggested node tag for
tube stop POIs?

Tom.