Recently I worked on a software project which required information on the locations of London bus stops along with the routes those buses take between these stops. The project mapped this information using Microsoft's Virtual Earth with their SDK. Specifically I needed the following information about the bus network in order to feed the data into the SDK:
- Longitude and latitude of all 19,000 bus stops (GPS locations)
- The textual description of each bus stop
- The distance a bus travels between adjacent bus-stops on a bus route
- Stop-Snapping Data – specifically the stop sequence for each direction of each bus route (called the 'route-run')
Transport for London (TFL) collected all of this bus information under a specific project called iBus (ran for London Buses) and computerised it. So I decided to request this information from TFL under the freedom of information act (FOIA). I wrote a letter to TFL, to which I eventually got a response via email.
Much to my amazement, the response from TFL came with all the data I requested! Hurrah for the FOIA!
The information came back as a CSV file with points 1, 2, and 4 (above) contained within. Although in the response from TFL they claimed that they did not include point 4 – they actually did (hence why the CSV has 58,200 rows in it).
I thought I would make this information available for all to use.
Please let me know if you found this information useful...
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6 comments:
Lovely, just what I needed thanks. Have you ever found the stop sequences for the other forms of TFL transport - tube, DLR, etc?
Glad to be of help.
I haven't requested this, but you could try - again under the freedom of information act.
You could use the letter I linked to as a template.
Thanks!! Very useful information. I can't really figure out the lat/lon information though, it seems it is not in degrees, but something else.
By the way you can get the tubestation information from the TFL site.
From the paper it appears that the location uses the Ordnance Survey2 (OS) Eastings and Northings
coordinate reference system.
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/ITS_2007_BusStopLocations_v00e.pdf
I don't know what the conversion is. I assume there is some sort of false datum.
Turns out it is
http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong-gridref.html
Well done for getting hold of this! Do you know if anyone has built an app with it yet?
As I was stuck at West Hampstead Overground station this morning looking at a broken down train it occurred to me how useful this information could be. TfL's site just told me what I already knew - that there were problems on the Overground. :(
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