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As SatNav becomes the norm for navigation when driving, is there scope to use the same techiques to improve the public transport experience?

This page explores some of the possibilities.

The screen shows tracks recorded when travelling on public transport. The red line is the East Coast main line. The black line is the 28 bus from Beamish to Gateshead. They cross at Birtley in County Durham.

The stats on the left give the time, speed, direction and altitude when the photo was taken but the maximum and average speed of the train journey.

A GPS system for £80

The above is a Nokia 7710 pda. Available on second hand market. Ebay etc. £35

The software is from http://www.wild-mobile.com/eng/download.php which is either free or a small number of dollars.

The GPS device being used is a Nikkai unit from Maplin. £40

There are no mobile phone or comms charges. The GPS device works out the position from satelites and the PDA picks up the position from the GPS device using Bluetooth.

Please and other combinations of equipment and software that you would recommend.

OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap creates and provides free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The maps are available for reuse under Creative Commons licenses

Users of the ITO service may find that they have access to a service to view the OSM data in detail.

NaPTAN bus stop data has not yet been provided to OSM but it can be overlaid as is shown on this screen shop of Shrewsbury.

Map provided CC-by-SA

In this Mapviewer software the map is exported from OSM in JPEG format and convered to Mapviewer OGF2 format using "SmartCom OGF2 Converter Tool". Selected fields from NaPTAN data can be moved to a csv spreadsheet saved in .wpt file format.

Once loaded onto the PDA the map has to be callibrated, but bus stops where the Lat/Long values are know from NaPTAN data are very useful to do this.

The yellow line shows a trace of the journey undertaken, which should how accurately the pointer can follow the map and bus stop locations.

Uploading GPS traces to OpenStreetMap

Although traces are often done by cycling, traces taken on public transport can also be uploaded to OSM and used to help edit and improve the OSM maps.

Sometimes the GPS device does not get a valid reading because of screening material in the windows eg on Voyager or Desiro trains, and of course does not work in tunnels though as these are usually straight this may not be too much of a problem. OSM requires GPX files so they can be coverted from other formats using the gpsbabel website.

To convert a .plt, file from Mapviewer to .gpx for uploading to OpenStreetMap use these settings:

 
Type of GPS data you want to convert:  Tracks [T]
Input file format:  OziExplorer [W][T][R]
Output file format:  GPX XML [W][T][R]
Upload your GPS file here:  
Put the converted file into a .zip archive:  no
Try to output ALL types of data (W,T,R):  no

Knowing when to get off the bus

Of course you can ask the driver or equipment on the vehicle might announce or display the next stop. However GPS services increasingly being built into mobile phones could also do the job by showing the current position on a map and optionally giving an alert as each bus stop is approached.

The passenger could download the NaPTAN points and perhaps the route tracks for the journey they are to undertake, of perhaps all NaPTAN points for the localities they will pass through. There may be scope for the desktop journey planner to export these resources for the journey planned which could also include details for the walk links at each end of the journey and any interchanges in between.

There is some discussion of how the tracks of bus routes could be held in OSM.

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