Bus Fare Data

[julianlstar]

Thanks to Sam Easterby-Smith we now have access to the entire GMPTE
bus fare data set. Although it is not in a particularly easy format.
Would be interesting to see what comes out of this and whether there
are actually any inconsistencies across the network.
The dataset can be downloaded from the ODM wiki here:

http://wiki.opendatamanchester.org.uk/index.php/GMPTE_Datasets

J

[Sam Smith]

Bits of it are horrendously out of date. Especially some of the stagecoach routes (41,42,43, 44, 142, 143, 144) .

But I love that there's historical data in here. It shows how the prices jumped on Oxford Road when UK North got shut down.

Sam

--
Talk does not cook rice
- Chinese Proverb

[Ian M]

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone (Sam,Julian,others?) have had a go at writing
a parser for the above data?

Cheers,

Ian

[Sam Smith]

Not had chance to do anything other than look at routes I know, but it should be pretty simple to match it on to another dataset such as Ben's journey times stuff - a second parser should be mostly unneccessary. Since prices don't meant a huge amount outside of the bus route context.

There's a clear crowdsourcing site/app here which lets people enter the price they actually paid for a bus fare, and see what the data says they should have paid. I suspect that some operators may not be entirely timely with their prices. Especially if matched against where they got on/off, and what their ticket says.

Sam

--
Mistakes: It could be that the purpose of your life is only
to serve as a warning to others

[Julian Tait]

I think the difficulties with this data is that it needs to be mapped onto the bus routes. Having gone through some of the fare tables the fare stages listed don't necessarily correlate to the NaPTAN database. From what I have been told these fare stages have been around for years and were the original GM Buses ones. Hence on the 86 Bus Route you have a stage such as Seymours - which is a pub that was demolished 8 years ago. The NaPTAN doesn't reference this.

So I think the fare stages have to be overlaid onto the routes which could be a bit of a task. Fortunately if you have several bus services that pass a fare stage they will use that fare stage even though there routes may deviate.

Julian

[Ian M]

I'm going to have a go at the regex part Sunday and Next Friday.

Then perhaps try and match up the named nodes in the fare data with a
couple of routes and see if it kinda makes sense.

I'm definitely sure that a bit of crowd sourced data would aid.
Perhaps people can just upload pics of the tiks to flickr and we can
OCR them?

[Julian Tait]

Hi Ian,

If you need any help with this, just let us know.

Julian

[Ian M]

Hi,

Myself and Justin Hellings have got a regex for parsing the sample
fare data.
This gets all the fares for a routes nodes.

The fares will be in one space seperated string, so getting the actual
fare in pence from a node to another node is the next step.

If there's any uber regex experts out there you may find a way to do a
non-greedy match on the array of fare's. We spent a bit of time trying
to achieve this, before deciding an incode appraoch was probably going
to work as well.

I'll try and provide examples in php, ruby and Java for how to do this
using the regex, and exploding the fare string.

The files are at:
http://github.com/alterisian/gmpte_fare_data_parser

I will aim to put up a simple rails app on heroku to support this.

One todo that stands out is mapping the fare data nodes to the naptan
nodes.
Has someone simple ideas on that?

Cheers,

Ian.

[Julian Tait]

When I looked at the fare stage data, there were a number of legacy stop descriptions. I think that it probably would be a manual job. Gruntwork but not too difficult. Would you suggest replacing the Fare Stages with NaPTAN identifiers?

J

[Ian M]

> When I looked at the fare stage data, there were a number of legacy stop descriptions. I think that it probably would be a manual job. Gruntwork but not too difficult. Would you suggest replacing the Fare Stages with NaPTAN identifiers?

Ok, I guess the output of the parsing of the Fare Data, will give us a
big list of 'stop descriptions'.
If the end app has an 'equivalent NaPTAN' field then initially we can
privately share the app to trusted peeps to manually fill in the
equivalent NaPTAN node/stop.

How are the efforts going to get the Manchester NaPTAN stops list
online?

Cheers,

Ian.

[Julian Tait]

Hi Ian,

We are trying to get the localised bi-weekly NaPTAN updates. There is still a non-existant issue with derived data that GMPTE are concerned about. You can download the national quarterly NaPTAN database here http://data.gov.uk/dataset/naptan

This is available under the Government's new reuse license. It will have all the stops on there. I did do a localised version on the 28th June which can be used as I don't think fare stage stops will have changed since then. It is under the FILES section on the group

J

Julian Tait

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