Recently I helped Pupul Chatterjee map bus stops in Birmingham for the BrumTransport. I thought I’d share the process here as it demonstrates a number of techniques in filtering data that isn’t helpfully categorised.
Does the data exist? Searching in the right place
I started my search for bus stop data at Google’s Tables search engine – this allows you to search public Google Fusion Tables as well as ‘web tables’. I started with a broad search for “bus stops” – the top result looked promising: a Guardian datablog post on “Every bus stop, train station, ferry port and taxi rank in Britain“.
That post included a link to a fusion table that mapped those stops, as well as the original data on Data.gov.uk.
The question was: how easily could we extract Birmingham bus stops from that? Continue reading