Public Transport Maps

This information is about transport route maps. See also the section on Interchanges for diagrams and maps of interchanges.

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.

What Bus

What Bus?! integrated bus route maps of London use Google maps as a background.

Ordnance Survey

Information about Opendata products

The Traveline response to the Consultation on Government's proposal to open up Ordnance Survey's data.

Clarification by examples of when OS claim data is derived and when it is not

It seems that if intermediate times are inferred from the road centre line this would not be copyright. Also if a directional offset is inferred from the road centre line then this would not be copyright. However if the route of a bus is shown as running on the road centre line the would be regarded as copying an OS feature and would be copyright.

This is an interpretation based on the examples provided by the OS "to help you identify what, if any, ongoing licensing implications will be associated with your intended use of Ordnance Survey data"

Ed Parsons of Google confirms this in "Well done OS! derived rules clarified".

OSM foundation Licensing Working Group comments:

The Ordnance Survey has just, as hoped, moved to the (UK) Open Government License, However they have done this by incorporating it in a license of their own terms which http://blog.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/2011/01/changes-to-the-os-opendata-licence/ says "It is also now fully interoperable with the Open Data Commons Attribution Licence."
but
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/docs/os-opendata-licence.pdf says: ""The same attribution statements must be contained in any sublicenses of the information that you grant, together with a requirement that any further sub-licences do the same"

Public Sector Mapping Agreement

On 31 March 2010 Communities and Local Government published the then Government's response to its consultation on policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey.

In its response, CLG set out its intention to move to a commercial relationship with Ordnance Survey to provide mapping products and services to Government, and, subject to discussions, the entire public sector, under a centrally-funded Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA).

CLG now confirms that a PSMA for provision of Ordnance Survey GI data to all of the public sector in England and Wales will come into effect from 1 April 2011. CLG has published a Transition Plan, setting out the scope of the PSMA and plans to implement the agreement by 1 April 2011. The Transition Plan can be viewed at: http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/transitionplanaug2010

Clarification by OS of use of ITN data by local authorities

Question from ITO to OS:


Q.  “I am asking you to make a statement to ITO (or to the regions)  
on behalf of the OS to say that the OS are content with the local  
authorities using ITN data to derive intermediate running times for  
public transport services between timing points and that the  
resulting data is not in any way restricted by OS licensing.”

Answer (6 April 2010) from James Brayshaw Director of Ordnance Survey:


A. We can confirm that Local Authorities may use ITN data, licensed  
under Collective Purchasing Agreement, to create public transport  
timetables represented in numerical format. Local Authorities may  
retain such timetables on expiry of the ITN licence. Furthermore the  
local authorities may supply the numerical timetables to third  
parties, such as ITO for onward publishing, without being restricted  
by OS licensing.

I hope this clarifies.

Clarification of what Traveline data is free of OS copyright

"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

"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.

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

Mapping Seminar

SDG provided a mapping seminar attended by a number of journey planner and mapping suppliers and some of the Traveline regions.

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

GPX data format is useful for transferring data to and between 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

The file can be enhanced by adding mapping points from OpenStreetMap. At the moment this is a manual process. The following example has been enhanced:

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

This data can be converted into many other formats in GPSbabel, and then loaded into navigation systems to see the route relative to the passengers current position, not least to know when to get off the bus.

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:

Note how the route is related to the bus stop. Mapphoto

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

Christoph Boehme writes on Talk-Transit: "here are some ideas which might be helpful for you:

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.