Hi all,
I started contributing to OSM regularly not so long ago and, so far, I
mostly dealt with infrastructure and shops in my area. I realized that
the bus going from my town to the next big city was missing from the
data, which is not so surprising as it is a small company with only 5
runs a week.
But I also realized that none of the inter-regional commercial bus lines
I know of were present in OSM. Like, public (as in government-run) urban
transit is there and the rail network also. I'm thinking things like
Greyhound, Flixbus, Megabus and the like, so privately run companies
that offer public (as in "mass") transit options, on regular, well
defined lines. Also, I am using "inter-regional" as in "from city to
city", to a scale larger than urban systems.
Digging a bit, I think one of the reason might be that urban public
transit societies often make their lines, stops and timetables available
through GTFS files, while privately run companies do not. On the other
hand, inter-regional lines are often made of only a few stops, so doing
manually shouldn't be _that_ hard ?
Furthermore, I checked the websites of the few largest such companies in
my region and I'm pretty sure I could set up some relatively simple
web-scraping scripts to extract the data. Leaving out the timetables,
the process should be not to hard and updates wouldn't be that frequent.
So what does the community here think of such a plan ? Is there another
reason than amount of work needed that explains why there are so few
commercial bus lines on OSM ?
In my region (Québec, Canada), rail service is a shame. It seems to me
that making OSM-based routing apps aware of the inter-regional bus lines
could be a plus for the end users.
Thanks!
--
Pascal
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