How much time would it take to fix public transport in Belgium in OSM?
by multimob — written on 2021-12-23
Most people will believe that this is something easy, or even trivial.
In most developped countries, bus routes do not change overnight. Public transport is heavily regulated and subsidised, which usually guarantees that service stays the same for long periods of time. And operators embraced open data policies. In addition, OSM data is already very developed, at least for road coverage.
To an external observer, adding all stops and routes looks like an almost trivial task. Give a good programmers a couple of days and with some magic scripts everything could be easily imported and maintained.
But is it really so? I wouldn’t be surprised that in two or five years from now we’ll be far from having achieved full coverage.
Do we lack programmers? No, definitely not.
Are we incompetent? Probably no.
Is it really complicated? Yes, definitely. And much more than everyone thinks.
Permalink: https://blog.multimob.be/zzaegheo4e.htm