Christoph Hanser

How to remotely map a city's public transport when due to the pandemic local trainings and community buildings are not possible.

Financed by the World Bank who wants to support the infrastructure of Mauritania and also the planning of the bus system, we from Trufi Association wanted to map the public transport of its capital Nouakchott. Our typical approach would be to train and empower local communities so that they can work with OpenStreetMap and public transport mapping in the long run, keep it updated, ensure ground truth, make it more sustainable. We would have made the mapping together and this way taught how to trace and upload bus lines, bus stops, and points of interest. The plan was to do this together with French organization “Les Libres Geographes” who are experts in this topic. Due to Corona, we were not allowed to enter the city and had to think of a plan B. We will show in this talk how a local team can do the collection of necessary data and how a remote team can do the mapping – organized by a regional partner who at least is nearby. We show how both sides could benefit nearly as much as if we had been there, and why this is in times of CO2 reduction and pandemic might be a wise choice for other cities and mapping projects as well. But we also show the limitations, for example that this would not have worked without a minimal preparation of the local people during the last years.

Trufi Association NGO offers an open-source journey planner app for formal and informal transport, based on public transport mapped in OpenStreetMap. In this extended talk, I would like to explain, how the participants can be customize the app to their own city, region, and country.

With Trufi, mappers and developers can customize an open-source journey planner app for their own city, region or country. Especially in emergent countries in Africa, Middle and South America and Southeast Asia, where informal traffic (no stops, undocumented routes) is mainly in use. For the public transport data part, OSM is used to map the routes, OSM2GTFS or our own tools are used to create GTFS, which is hosted in OTP. Besides the obvious tasks (map routes, customize app code), many more important steps need to be done: Get a team together, find develop perfect UX for your city, release, finance the server and map costs, do marketing, convince governments to collaborate, approach users, run analysis on data, improve OpenStreetMap routes, offer solutions for drivers, etc. I would like to talk about these necessary steps, with stories from our implementations in Bolivia, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Colombia. Finally, I would like to discuss in an extended Q&A part whether OpenStreetMap is made for 100s of (bus) routes - we had fruitful discussions with pros and cons on that in the talk-de mailing list in July 2019 that we could continue.