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Fixing Google Map Transit Feed Mistakes in Taiwan

140 points by danso 7y ago

robin_reala 7y ago
While it’s true that there will be a lot of visitors using Google Maps, I still think that it’s a shame that we’ve ended up reliant on a private company to direct us around. In the ideal longer term, it’d be better to use this effort to improve crowd-sourced or collaborative mapping solutions.
- yorwba 7y ago
  I'm only aware of one open-source public transport lookup app, which is Öffi https://oeffi.schildbach.de/index.html https://oeffi.schildbach.de/index.html It doesn't have data for Taiwan, unfortunately. Are there any that do? Aside: Audrey Tang is also on HN, though not active much lately: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=audreyt https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=audreyt It sometimes strikes me as surreal that powerful people actually hang out on the same websites as people like you and me.
  - BubuIIC 7y ago
    There's also Transportr, they use the same library for accessing transit data though. Transportr has some really good guides here, how it works under the hood and how to help with contributing other networks: https://transportr.app/contribute/ https://transportr.app/contribute/
- londons_explore 7y ago
  The blocker to open transit feeds is mostly transit providers. Most transit providers don't see timetables and routes as something to be distributed for free to everyone. They see it as a revenue opportunity - they will only make schedules available in their own app (which only routes on transit from their company), or sold for money. For smaller transit providers, they still want to be paid to produce the transit feeds, since they typically have to hire a programmer or buy software to make the transit feeds, and will only take on that cost if someone will pay for it - after all, they're happy with a paper printed timetable at the bus station. In some cases, there are also bureaucratic hurdles. In one case I would really like to name but can't, a (very big) transit provider didn't own the copyright on the names of their own stations - they only had a license to use the names within their own country. They made a transit data feed, but since the feed contained station names, they needed to sign a contract with anyone who used it assuring them the names of the stations would never leave the country. Obviously no app can ever guarantee the names of the stations would never leave the country, so the city had no transit mapping for ~a decade.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  Google Maps ingests public data feeds that anybody can use and many other transit aggregators do use: https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs This is much the same as AMP, which any link aggregator can use and many link aggregators do use, and dissimilar to something like Apple News API, which requires direct integration with Apple.
- tasogare 7y ago
  Yes, and in this case there is enough information in airports and train stations to get from one point to another without ever needing to use internet. When in doubt (which I precisely was yesterday to find a station reached only by local train), staff is here to help. Sad if people don’t consider this option, which can also be useful to save money.
  - kilroy_jones 7y ago
    This is true for the metro, but bus lines require Chinese for the most part. There are some really good apps for transport in Taipei.
irjustin 7y ago
Love it, someone who cares and is willing to drive the issue all the way home. I'm currently visiting San Francisco (SF) and experienced an opposite issue where GMaps reported cheaper and it ended up being more expensive. The BART train is a relatively fast, very cost effective way to get from SFO to downtown SF, Powell station in particular. I was debating Uber at $30-$40, but looked at GMaps for public and it told me $2.50 to make that trip! Sure it takes 40 minutes with a bit more sketch, but I'm visiting, I'm willing and it's cheap. Loaded up my Clipper card (BART's transit payment card) and went - ultra surprised when exited the turn style that my charge was $9.80. The to/from the airport is significantly more expensive, which is understandable, but $9.80 vs $30 is much different than $2.50 vs $30. Mildly frustrating, but in the end, not the end of the world.
- perennate 7y ago
  Looks like it is still wrong too (says $2.60). Also, SamTrans bus takes twice as long but is $2.25.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nhf 7y ago
  Looks like this is a known issue due to a misconfiguration of BART's transit feed. (Source: I work at Google and located the relevant bug, but I don't work on maps.)
londons_explore 7y ago
Somethings up with transit data feeds in general... Creating a transit data feed typically requires local knowledge, technical knowledge of data feed formats, and access to make changes to the data feed. Actual transit providers typically lack the technical knowledge, especially for making day-to-day service updates. Transit enthusiasts lack the access to make changes to the feed. Google and mapping companies lack the local knowledge. End result: Probably half the worlds population's local bus/train isn't accurate/present on Google/Apple/OSM maps. How can this be solved? Perhaps some kind of feed-wiki so the three interested parties can do human collaboration?
- cbhl 7y ago
  The Transit app crowd-sources this from users who are using the "Go" feature in select markets. There's also the Tripshot model -- an enterprise product where drivers install an app on a cell phone to track ridership, and it also sends the gps coordinates along. That said, the other arcane part of transit directions is that if you update or break your feed, you have to wait hours or days before the result shows up on Google. (Sigh, batch processing...)
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    You know you can request Google scrape your 'static' feed at any interval you like, down to 10 minutes IIRC? Contact the maps-transit team with your feed URL and they'll update it for you. They only scrape daily by default because some transit providers host their multi-gigabyte GTFS feeds for all bus arrivals for the next century on an ISDN line...
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    A major issue with relying on drivers is that if the real-time position of a driver is known, you can see both what they're doing and what they're not doing. Which is bad if you want to get away with, say, taking longer breaks than you're supposed to. Anecdotally, at a local system I once used there was an issue where drivers were intentionally not turning on the locating tracking, or configuring it incorrectly, because of this.
kelnos 7y ago
> It’s unclear how long the feed was incorrect, but the first time I noticed the error was in 2018. My first visit after the new Taoyuan line was completed was in July 2017, and I'm pretty sure it was incorrect then, too. A local told me about the new line and said it was so much better, but when I tried to use GMaps to plot the trip, it showed as much longer than the older, more complicated options (and yes, I did end up taking a taxi). On my more recent trips I've ignored GMaps and taken the Taoyuan line to/from the airport, and it's so much nicer. If you're going somewhere near Taipei Main Station, the total trip time is roughly the same as that of a taxi; even if you're not, the cost savings is nice.
autarch 7y ago
When I was in Taiwan this past summer we took Uber to the airport from Taipei. I'm pretty sure our decision was based on in part on this misinformation. Well, now I'll know for our next visit!
- komali2 7y ago
  My preferred method is a bus that gives you a great view of the mountains on your way into Taipei. Plus they're like five bucks or something and take an hour just like all the other ways.
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    Except that the train actually takes 36 minutes, which is most of the point of TFA.
    - komali2 7y ago
      Add on getting to and then waiting for the train to leave... The bus depot is right outside the terminal exit. I mean yes trains good, just saying.
emilfihlman 7y ago
What I don't understand is that Google sees exactly how long a trip with the train takes and could have automatically fixed the estimate to the correct one...
- nhf 7y ago
  Google Maps entirely relies on the data given by transit agencies through their GTFS feeds, whether they be static or real-time. It doesn't do the same type of calculation that the driving navigation does where they average travel times based on other users' movement. There are some other apps like Transit App that attempt to crowdsource the same data to reflect ETAs.
Misteur-Z 7y ago
I only use CityMapper now in Paris 1) I don't want to feed the Google behemoth 2) It's very very accurate, even tells if you should get in the back/center/front to be closer to next commute/exit 3) They joke about strikes to brighten a bit those shitty days https://citymapper.com https://citymapper.com
camillomiller 7y ago
This will come out as cynical, I know, but I have to say that when I see people so excited about freely contributing their time and efforts to the product of a global behemoth, something feels off. I know we all have a better free service as a result, but still this is basically free work. If anything, Google has been the most successful company ever in convincing people to work for free (and hand over their data). No judgement intended, just an observation.
- fsflover 7y ago
  Totally agree. If you really want to help the society, consider contributing to openstreetmap.
- darren_ 7y ago
  GTFS feeds are open. The ‘G’ stands for general. This person is excited about freely fixing this issue for _everyone_, they’ve just chosen to frame their blogpost around the most popular surface for that feed. huge disclaimer: I work at google, and on transit at that
  - pinwale 7y ago
    well, the "G" originally stood for Google.
    - jrockway 7y ago
      Somebody has to write the standards. Transit agencies don't care about making a data format that works for other transit agencies, as it doesn't affect them. Only companies that need data from multiple transit agencies will do this kind of work. There are two approaches to aggregating data. You can either treat each agency as a unique snowflake, or you can convince all agencies to use the same format. The former approach means that all work you do is only for you, and you've built up an interesting base of intellectual property in an industry that doesn't matter. (There is no money in providing transit directions.) The latter means that anyone can show up and do neat things with transit data. (I have my own little webpage, jrock.us/mta.html that uses this data to provide me with exactly the interface I want. Do you think the MTA wanted to hire programmers to make this for people like me? Absolutely not. But they did make it for Google, and now I benefit.)
odiroot 7y ago
Exactly too late for me. I've been there in October and the data was not updated yet. I took the bus (which was shown as being faster!) and got stuck in a traffic for 2h. I arrived at my hotel exhausted and frustrated.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  I've got a strategy that's worked well almost everywhere in the world: never take road-based transport if there's a rail option, even if the rail option supposedly takes a bit longer. Buses are less reliable, prone to traffic, less comfortable (especially if crowded)...

140 points by danso 7y ago

While it’s true that there will be a lot of visitors using Google Maps, I still think that it’s a shame that we’ve ended up reliant on a private company to direct us around. In the ideal longer term, it’d be better to use this effort to improve crowd-sourced or collaborative mapping solutions.

yorwba 7y ago
I'm only aware of one open-source public transport lookup app, which is Öffi https://oeffi.schildbach.de/index.html https://oeffi.schildbach.de/index.html It doesn't have data for Taiwan, unfortunately. Are there any that do? Aside: Audrey Tang is also on HN, though not active much lately: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=audreyt https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=audreyt It sometimes strikes me as surreal that powerful people actually hang out on the same websites as people like you and me.
- BubuIIC 7y ago
  There's also Transportr, they use the same library for accessing transit data though. Transportr has some really good guides here, how it works under the hood and how to help with contributing other networks: https://transportr.app/contribute/ https://transportr.app/contribute/
londons_explore 7y ago
The blocker to open transit feeds is mostly transit providers. Most transit providers don't see timetables and routes as something to be distributed for free to everyone. They see it as a revenue opportunity - they will only make schedules available in their own app (which only routes on transit from their company), or sold for money. For smaller transit providers, they still want to be paid to produce the transit feeds, since they typically have to hire a programmer or buy software to make the transit feeds, and will only take on that cost if someone will pay for it - after all, they're happy with a paper printed timetable at the bus station. In some cases, there are also bureaucratic hurdles. In one case I would really like to name but can't, a (very big) transit provider didn't own the copyright on the names of their own stations - they only had a license to use the names within their own country. They made a transit data feed, but since the feed contained station names, they needed to sign a contract with anyone who used it assuring them the names of the stations would never leave the country. Obviously no app can ever guarantee the names of the stations would never leave the country, so the city had no transit mapping for ~a decade.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
Google Maps ingests public data feeds that anybody can use and many other transit aggregators do use: https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs This is much the same as AMP, which any link aggregator can use and many link aggregators do use, and dissimilar to something like Apple News API, which requires direct integration with Apple.
tasogare 7y ago
Yes, and in this case there is enough information in airports and train stations to get from one point to another without ever needing to use internet. When in doubt (which I precisely was yesterday to find a station reached only by local train), staff is here to help. Sad if people don’t consider this option, which can also be useful to save money.
- kilroy_jones 7y ago
  This is true for the metro, but bus lines require Chinese for the most part. There are some really good apps for transport in Taipei.

irjustin 7y ago

Love it, someone who cares and is willing to drive the issue all the way home. I'm currently visiting San Francisco (SF) and experienced an opposite issue where GMaps reported cheaper and it ended up being more expensive. The BART train is a relatively fast, very cost effective way to get from SFO to downtown SF, Powell station in particular. I was debating Uber at $30-$40, but looked at GMaps for public and it told me $2.50 to make that trip! Sure it takes 40 minutes with a bit more sketch, but I'm visiting, I'm willing and it's cheap. Loaded up my Clipper card (BART's transit payment card) and went - ultra surprised when exited the turn style that my charge was $9.80. The to/from the airport is significantly more expensive, which is understandable, but $9.80 vs $30 is much different than $2.50 vs $30. Mildly frustrating, but in the end, not the end of the world.

perennate 7y ago
Looks like it is still wrong too (says $2.60). Also, SamTrans bus takes twice as long but is $2.25.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nhf 7y ago
Looks like this is a known issue due to a misconfiguration of BART's transit feed. (Source: I work at Google and located the relevant bug, but I don't work on maps.)

londons_explore 7y ago

Somethings up with transit data feeds in general... Creating a transit data feed typically requires local knowledge, technical knowledge of data feed formats, and access to make changes to the data feed. Actual transit providers typically lack the technical knowledge, especially for making day-to-day service updates. Transit enthusiasts lack the access to make changes to the feed. Google and mapping companies lack the local knowledge. End result: Probably half the worlds population's local bus/train isn't accurate/present on Google/Apple/OSM maps. How can this be solved? Perhaps some kind of feed-wiki so the three interested parties can do human collaboration?

cbhl 7y ago
The Transit app crowd-sources this from users who are using the "Go" feature in select markets. There's also the Tripshot model -- an enterprise product where drivers install an app on a cell phone to track ridership, and it also sends the gps coordinates along. That said, the other arcane part of transit directions is that if you update or break your feed, you have to wait hours or days before the result shows up on Google. (Sigh, batch processing...)
- londons_explore 7y ago
  You know you can request Google scrape your 'static' feed at any interval you like, down to 10 minutes IIRC? Contact the maps-transit team with your feed URL and they'll update it for you. They only scrape daily by default because some transit providers host their multi-gigabyte GTFS feeds for all bus arrivals for the next century on an ISDN line...
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  A major issue with relying on drivers is that if the real-time position of a driver is known, you can see both what they're doing and what they're not doing. Which is bad if you want to get away with, say, taking longer breaks than you're supposed to. Anecdotally, at a local system I once used there was an issue where drivers were intentionally not turning on the locating tracking, or configuring it incorrectly, because of this.

kelnos 7y ago

> It’s unclear how long the feed was incorrect, but the first time I noticed the error was in 2018. My first visit after the new Taoyuan line was completed was in July 2017, and I'm pretty sure it was incorrect then, too. A local told me about the new line and said it was so much better, but when I tried to use GMaps to plot the trip, it showed as much longer than the older, more complicated options (and yes, I did end up taking a taxi). On my more recent trips I've ignored GMaps and taken the Taoyuan line to/from the airport, and it's so much nicer. If you're going somewhere near Taipei Main Station, the total trip time is roughly the same as that of a taxi; even if you're not, the cost savings is nice.

autarch 7y ago

When I was in Taiwan this past summer we took Uber to the airport from Taipei. I'm pretty sure our decision was based on in part on this misinformation. Well, now I'll know for our next visit!

komali2 7y ago
My preferred method is a bus that gives you a great view of the mountains on your way into Taipei. Plus they're like five bucks or something and take an hour just like all the other ways.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  Except that the train actually takes 36 minutes, which is most of the point of TFA.
  - komali2 7y ago
    Add on getting to and then waiting for the train to leave... The bus depot is right outside the terminal exit. I mean yes trains good, just saying.

emilfihlman 7y ago

What I don't understand is that Google sees exactly how long a trip with the train takes and could have automatically fixed the estimate to the correct one...

nhf 7y ago
Google Maps entirely relies on the data given by transit agencies through their GTFS feeds, whether they be static or real-time. It doesn't do the same type of calculation that the driving navigation does where they average travel times based on other users' movement. There are some other apps like Transit App that attempt to crowdsource the same data to reflect ETAs.

Misteur-Z 7y ago

I only use CityMapper now in Paris 1) I don't want to feed the Google behemoth 2) It's very very accurate, even tells if you should get in the back/center/front to be closer to next commute/exit 3) They joke about strikes to brighten a bit those shitty days https://citymapper.com https://citymapper.com

camillomiller 7y ago

This will come out as cynical, I know, but I have to say that when I see people so excited about freely contributing their time and efforts to the product of a global behemoth, something feels off. I know we all have a better free service as a result, but still this is basically free work. If anything, Google has been the most successful company ever in convincing people to work for free (and hand over their data). No judgement intended, just an observation.

fsflover 7y ago
Totally agree. If you really want to help the society, consider contributing to openstreetmap.
darren_ 7y ago
GTFS feeds are open. The ‘G’ stands for general. This person is excited about freely fixing this issue for _everyone_, they’ve just chosen to frame their blogpost around the most popular surface for that feed. huge disclaimer: I work at google, and on transit at that
- pinwale 7y ago
  well, the "G" originally stood for Google.
  - jrockway 7y ago
    Somebody has to write the standards. Transit agencies don't care about making a data format that works for other transit agencies, as it doesn't affect them. Only companies that need data from multiple transit agencies will do this kind of work. There are two approaches to aggregating data. You can either treat each agency as a unique snowflake, or you can convince all agencies to use the same format. The former approach means that all work you do is only for you, and you've built up an interesting base of intellectual property in an industry that doesn't matter. (There is no money in providing transit directions.) The latter means that anyone can show up and do neat things with transit data. (I have my own little webpage, jrock.us/mta.html that uses this data to provide me with exactly the interface I want. Do you think the MTA wanted to hire programmers to make this for people like me? Absolutely not. But they did make it for Google, and now I benefit.)

odiroot 7y ago

Exactly too late for me. I've been there in October and the data was not updated yet. I took the bus (which was shown as being faster!) and got stuck in a traffic for 2h. I arrived at my hotel exhausted and frustrated.

_-___________-_ 7y ago
I've got a strategy that's worked well almost everywhere in the world: never take road-based transport if there's a rail option, even if the rail option supposedly takes a bit longer. Buses are less reliable, prone to traffic, less comfortable (especially if crowded)...