The Import

Yesterday I performed an import of NaPTAN bus stop data for the Aberdeen area. The motivations behind this import were:

1. To greatly increase the coverage of bus stop data in the area.
2. To get some experience importing data (hence the very specific and simple scope of this import).
3. To establish a method of importing NaPTAN data since the original import was abandoned (and all of this very useful data has been sitting unused).

Results

Increased Stop Coverage

The import changsets can be found by looking at user naptan_import_aberdeen.

In total there were 63 regions of the Aberdeen area imported as separate changesets. Across those a total of 1357 bus stops were imported - of which 875 (64%) were new and 482 (36%) were conflated with existing stops.

The Aberdeen region (the city centre) had the most stops with 154 total. While the Countesswells and Footdee regions tied for the least with just 1 stop each.

Experience Gained

I think the most valuable experience I’ve gained from this import was in consulting the community and following the import guidelines. It’s quite daunting when you first see the guidelines and was honestly a little off-putting for me personally because I’ve been fatigued by aspects of the OSM community in the past. Thankfully, the UK community are quick to respond on the mailing lists and very helpful and constructive.

If I hadn’t consulted the mailing lists then I wouldn’t have known how useful and important some of the NaPTAN data fields are. Originally I was of the mindset that only the naptan:AtcoCode was necessary to import since it establishes a link between the OSM data and the NaPTAN data. However, after actually performing the import I can already say that the other fields helped me to distinguish between stops in close proximity with the same name.

Method Established

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