Mapping bus transit services in Hyderabad - An illustrative example of the use of open geospatial data

Abstract

Most public transit agencies in India do a poor job of making even basic route information available to the public. The transit mapping exercise reported here demonstrates that crowd-sourcing can be used to generate useful data at very low cost. Bus routes, including route frequency information, are identified and mapped, and the maps used to identify areas of the city which are not well served by the transit system. Available information about the socio-economic status of the underserved areas is used to fulfill a secondary objective of showing that mapping of public transit and paratransit networks can offer insights into how considerations of equity, access and safety can be integrated into transit planning in urban areas where spatial data is hard to come by, especially in cities of the global south.