Maps

All Europe map of Public Transport

The above extract uses the Route relation tags in OpenStreetMap. By logging on it is possible to edit the map to add bus routes to the road links they run on.

• Go to the public transport map
• Go to OpenSteetMap

Lists of routes

North East

• Metro line Yellow
• Metro line Green
• Arriva bus route 448
• Go Ahead bus route 1
• Go Ahead bus route 2
• Go Ahead bus route 28
• Stagecoach bus route 1

Cardiff

• Cardiff Bus route 2
• Cardiff Bus route 6
• Cardiff Bus route 7
• Cardiff Bus route 8
• Cardiff Bus route 11
• Cardiff Bus route 12
• Cardiff Bus route 13
• Cardiff Bus route 27
• Cardiff Bus route 28
• Cardiff Bus route 29
• Cardiff Bus route 29B
• Cardiff Bus route 30
• Cardiff Bus route 35
• Cardiff Bus route 36
• Cardiff Bus route 38
• Cardiff Bus route 39
• Cardiff Bus route 44
• Cardiff Bus route 45
• Cardiff Bus route 49
• Cardiff Bus route 50
• Cardiff Bus route 52
• Cardiff Bus route 52A
• Cardiff Bus route 57
• Cardiff Bus route 58

What Bus

Ordnance Survey

"It was established that if a Local Authority was displaying its own
data with no route or other Ordnance Survey data, for example bus 
stops, on Ordnance Survey mapping for its own area then it did not 
need a commercial agreement and could provide that functionality under 
the MSA provided that the mapping carried a Local Authority watermark."
- notes of meeting between National Traveline and Ordnance Survey on 26 May 2006.

the reason the OS were happy to refer to the bus stop data as "the local authority's own data" was because it has been collected using GPS devices. It is important that the location of bus stops continues to be collected without reference to OS maps.

"I can assure the OSM community that the Department for Transport has
been assured by Ordnance Survey that they do not claim any rights over NaPTAN
location data - and it is a matter of record that Department for Transport is
the owner of the NPTG database.  Both NaPTAN and NPTG are maintained by DfT as
national databases, collating data from all local transport authorities in
England, Wales and Scotland." - Roger Slevin DfT March 2009  

"OS are interested in the use of data that is derived from maps ie if a map
has been used to create timetable data.  They have route planning fees 
and this can potentially hit journey planners if OS can claim a stake
in the data."
- advice from a Local Authority map licencing officer.

OS notes on publishing OS derived data with other maps as a backdrop (OS password is needed)

Number 10 reponse to UK FreeMaps epetition

November 2009 Government Announcement on Greater access to Ordnance Survey Data

December 2009 Government Smarter Choice Announcement Radically opening up data and promoting transparency

Consultation on Government's proposal to open up Ordnance Survey's data.

Mapping Seminar

We may have seen maps in the journey planner as a nice-to-have feature that you either do or do not have. The workshops focused on the user needs for mapping at different stages of the enquiry and stages in travel. It may be possible to switch on and off different levels of detail to respond to the user need, for instance the landmarks that you need on a map when you are on a bus and want to know when to get off, are very different from the map needed to walk from the bus stop to your final destination. We considered the role of maps in verifying the journey solution, helping the user to build up a mental map of the journey and options available, and visualising the impact of disruption or special events. The future direction of mapping is to respond to personalisation of the enquiry service and deliver maps to mobile devices.

Cartographers from the University of Glasgow presented their work and referred to studies of maps for public transport that are soon to appear in the online journalofmaps

Ordnance Survey attended. Several attending encouraged traveline to negotiate the sale of its walk links information. The walks that contribute most to the improvement of journey planning could be made part of the map datasets, ahead of the national surveying of them by OS. These might for instance include walks that link rail station entrances to the highway network.

Maps created from data

This diagram is created entirely from public transport data. The route from Nedderton to Blyth Bus station was found in a Traveline journey planner. The journey solution involved a change at Red Lion, Glebe Road.

The journey planner gave a listing of all the intermediate stop points. The coordinates of these points provide the route but it would be a jagged line. Therefore the bearing of the stop is obtained from NaPTAN and it used to create a Bezier curve through the StopPoint which more accurately repesents the curves of the road.

The Stop Point names are the Common Names of the timing points along route.

The locality names are applied as the open circles, centred on the coordinates of the locality.

Data for Navigation systems

Here are the GPX files for a bus route created as an ordered list of the bus stops the route calls at:

• Bus 185, from Twice Brewed to Greenhead, showing a rural route

• Bus 448, from Nedderton to Blyth, showing an urban, inter urban route.

The routes can be seen as a diagram in OpenStreetMap and the GPX file downloaded:

• Bus 185 showing the westbound direction, a loop in Haltwhistle and turning at the Roman Army Museum
• Bus 448 showing the eastbound direction and a straight section on the A19 without bus stops. This is the same route as shown above under "Maps created from data".

The routes can be seen in Everytrail overlaid on Googlemaps:

• Bus 185
• Bus 448

The routes can be seen in GoogleEarth:

• Bus 185 (not tested)
• Bus 448 (not tested)

Here is a spreadsheet showing how the GPS file was created from the timetable and associated data.

Manipulating OSM Route=Bus data

• I use Xapi [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Xapi ] a lot to retrieve only a specific portion of the OSM data for a large area (e.g. all relations with a route=bus tag).
• Once I have osm file with all the data I need, I find it quite convenient to use xslt to convert the xml data into other formats. I have some scripts that might be helpful to get the grip of xslt. If you are interested I can sent them to you. I use these scripts for example to convert nodes or ways from osm into sql insert statements, but you can easily create a csv files as well.
• Topological maps can be created with mapnik which supports outputting svg files. If you use version 0.6.0 or newer you can directly use an osm file as data source.
• I do not know of any tool to create a straight line graph of a way. I thought a while ago about writing a tool to draw such graphs but never got round to actually do it. My idea was to reproject the input data way segment by way segment so that it was on a straight line and then feed this into mapnik.
• You could, of course, also write an xslt script which converts the osm data directly to mapnik.

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© Traveline 2010, Last updated: 21 January 2010