TTC bus stops for OpenStreetMap

Here is a look at the newly released Toronto Transit Commission data in the context of OpenStreetMap.

The city of Toronto released a bunch of data last week at the Toronto Innovation Showcase. The data was published under a homegrown open data license as part of the OpenTO initiative. I applaud this move towards openness and this support of open data.

This dataset from the Toronto Transit Commission includes approximately 10,000 bus stops and streetcar stops. Subway stop data is not included. I'm very excited to have this data provided by the TTC and the city of Toronto.

I have converted the data to a form that can be read by josm the Java OpenStreetMap editing tool. The screenshot above shows the TTC data in JOSM. You can find the converted data in .osm format linked below. I've also imported the bus stop data to a mysql database.

My very quick inspection of the bus stop locations with respect to highway centerlines in OpenStreetMap make me very happy. The alignment of the bus stops appears to be very reasonable in the two places I looked.

Please inspect the position of the bus stops for your part of the city and add your confidence to the data set. Have fun with the data.

Not Ready for Prime Time

This data should not yet be imported to OpenStreetMap.

There are known problems with this naive and rushed treatment of the data. About 100 of the 10,000 bus stops were broken by my naive conversion. Those have become nonsense locations in the dataset at 43, -79 and at 0, 0. It's broken. I know. Patches welcome.

There is additional data provided by the TTC that should be included before uploading to OSM. In fact complete route, schedule and stop order data were provided. This should be processed for a single import of each route, including forward and reverse stop order. If you plan to tackle this job please drop a note here so we don't duplicate efforts.

The Toronto license should also be vetted before considering this data for inclusion in OpenStreetMap.