Share map of GTFS usage

[emmambd]

Feature request

It's helpful for advocates for GTFS to know where in the world it's being seen by passengers. A visualization with statistics on the number of agencies, countries, (and roughly passengers impacted), would be helpful for the community.

Proposed solution
A map visualization based on a table/markdown file that the community can contribute to.

[derhuerst]

The geographical extent of the GTFS datasets on transit.land is already being visualised: https://www.transit.land/map

As a next step, I think it would be helpful to link GTFS datasets (and/or agency_ids) to Wikidata, which IMHO is a good place to reference other statistical data (e.g. number of passengers served per period of time) in a machine-readable way.

@hbruch, I and others have been planning to do this for Germany (highsource/verbundkarte#14, only in German unfortunately), with the goal of being able to visualise (almost) arbitrary metrics (nr of validation errors per feed/agency/stop, realtime data yes/no, fares data, etc.) related to transit data sets on a geographical map in a semi-automated fashion.

France's ministry of transportation has built such a visualisations already.

[emmambd]

@derhuerst Thank you for sharing your work! I look forward to following it. We've explored using Wikidata in the past (more specifically Wikibase, what Wikidata is built on), but had concerns about making it easy to ingest the data for consumers through the API and scaling the platform to accommodate all international transit data. Curious about your thoughts on this.

We were imagining this visualization serving a slightly different purpose from transit.land and other feed aggregators: it being a visual of anywhere we know GTFS is being used, including locations that may be relying on closed source feeds. The purpose would be primarily for advocates to have statistics on how widely used GTFS is and where, rather than discovering feeds. Perhaps we should focus on referencing pre-existing visualizations instead.