We're of the 30 Day Map Challenge and today's theme is "Data: OpenStreetMap".
(World Sustainable Transport Day) Map mobility, traffic flow, public transit networks, logistics chains, or advocate for sustainable transport options.
Whilst building a Power BI report recently, I needed to include a map layer for all of the UK's bus routes. I'd previously created maps bringing the data in for a specific operator in one part of the country as WKT, so I thought it would be relatively straight forward. However, it turned out there wasn't route data available in a geospatial format with coverage for the whole country.
It is however possible to download all the bus stops and timetable information for the whole country from the Department for Transport's open data service.
I downloaded the GTFS format data for all England's bus operators (many gigabytes worth!) and created a script to parse the data, and use a local instance of Open Route Service to generate the path between each bus stop following the roads, for each timetabled service.
This created a 1gb GeoJSON file representing the route data. I then used Tippecanoe to convert this file into a PMTiles file which I've uploaded into Azure Blob Storage.
I then created a vector style sheet and added as a reference layer into Icon Map Slicer. Thanks to the capabilities of PMTiles, we can use the whole file representing all the routes as a single reference layer:
Here's a Power BI report showing it in action.
And the .pbix file to download.