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by harryf 897 days ago
I used to work at https://www.local.ch/en and know Vasile, the guy that built this map.

The situation with trains (and data) in Switzerland is complicated as each Kanton has it's own rail network. In 2016 the SBB _finally_ started making it's train timetable officially available (some info on that here - https://www.itmagazine.ch/artikel/64746/Open-Data-Plattform_... ) which is I believe what this map uses, after shutting down people scraping the data.

That said, what has always irked me is they gave the data to Google as far back as 2007, while refusing to make anything available for sites like local.ch and map.search.ch (who's map was partly basis for the original Google maps). Refusing may be a leading term but certainly there was no help given to local Swiss companies, while Google already had the train times in maps.

1 comments

This doesn’t match my experience. Google requires feeds to be in a specific format [1] but the feed is push from the agency. When I was intimate with the details, agencies were strongly encouraged to publish these feeds at a public url. There were all kinds of things about the format itself that might not have worked for the good folks at local.ch but access to the data is not likely to have been a problem.

[1] https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs