[OSM-talk] BuzMap - Global Transit Map http://buz-map.com

Mark Lester mc_lester at yahoo.co.uk
Sun Jan 26 04:32:44 UTC 2020


Hello Mappers,I've been building this http://buz-map.com, there's a couple of read me's at the top. There are a stack of issues but this now looks eminently doable.
My pitch on all this is that people like maps. Give people a map of a transport network and they will follow the wiggly lines. They will notice that an island has a connecting ferry and a bus network (see Estonia). Envisage mountainous and wilderness areas and their transit geography more easily (see Sweden). Be able to scan an entire metropolis network to it's extremities without having to use trial and error (see Paris, Prague, Petersburg, Athens). And generally be intrigued and want to zoom in and discover. I am not having much success evangelizing this view with regard to a global transit map. If I can get this to a production state with all known GTFS, and sex up the high level areas that have no listed transport with a much deeper road network than you normally get at higher tiers, we will at least have the "intrigue me" travel map that I personally want. Obviously I haven't got very far with the front end. In particular it's not interacting very well on mobile, it's lousy in fact. I need help in any way shape or form available but if anyone knows how to get a thin line to interact in Leaflet on mobile, please suggest. I did try to paint a massive invisible one on top but it didn't work and I got nowhere with the debugger, so even help with that would be appreciated. I also want to do funky stuff like flipping the railways or buses to the foreground on touching. In a dense centre of a metropolis, being able to flip the metro or tram network to the top is already an important requirement. The Mapbox stuff does this but I haven't sussed the layers within tiles stuff and how to do it yet.
I've got a game plan to fix most of the other bugs, especially in the rail routing which is quite screwed right now once you zoom in. I will get the whole of the visible GTFS world on there, so all of USA that's available, and anything else that I can find. It's going to take a few months, probably most of the year including downtime. I say visible GTFS, as oppose to existing. There is an awful lot of bus data that patently exists as it's in booking engines, and in GTFS form if it's on Google, but isn't anywhere easily found.
What I want to investigate is to use the reduction method I have to draw efficient level 8 to 1 vector tiles of simplified road networks. So you can look at say all of India, US, Canada, China, Russia, Brazil or any area of that size, and get a decent view of the national road infrastructure even if I haven't got any bus data yet. I still will need to do some of the same simple reduction used for doing the detailed lower tier standard rendering of levels 7-16, i.e. filter road classifications down once it becomes an unavoidable mess even with reduction, leaving only motorways for the top two or so tiers. I think we will get a usable, readable and "representative" map of these upper layers, which by default are either road light or completely vacant. The bus network I have in Europe, which is just a tiny subset, is messy at the high level, I will try to refine it, but the trains work, so I am sure motorways will too and we'll tune in the lower road classifications and with appropriate clustering radii as we proceed down the tile tree.
Any input gratefully received. Apologies for the spam of three lists, please respond directly unless it's something of interest to more than just me. Also I am in contact with OSM folks, I know I am using free tile servers. How we run this as a public self funding service is one of the many things I need help with. It seems an obvious gimme for anyone selling bus tickets but it's not easy to get anyone to pick the phone up. I have resigned myself to having to build a production system in between doing not a lot.

Mark Lester
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