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 <[email protected]>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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