London Bus Stops API: Mapping northing/easting values to lat/long
I started playing around with the TFL Bus stop location and routes API and one of the annoying things about the data is that it uses easting/northing values to describe the location of bus stops rather than lat/longs.
The first few lines of the CSV file look like this:
1000,91532,490000266G,WESTMINSTER STN <> / PARLIAMENT SQUARE,530171,179738,177,0K08,0 10001,72689,490013793E,TREVOR CLOSE,515781,174783,78,NB16,0 10002,48461,490000108F,HIGHBURY CORNER,531614,184603,5,C902,0
For each of the stops I wanted to convert from the easting/northing value to the equivalent lat/long value but I couldn’t find a simple way of doing it in code although I did come across an API that would do it for me.
I wrote the following script to save a new CSV file with all the London bus stops and their lat/long location:
require 'rubygems' require 'csv' require 'open-uri' require 'json' data_dir = File.expand_path('data') + '/' file_name = data_dir + "stops.csv" stops = CSV.read(file_name).drop(1) out = CSV.open(data_dir + "stops_with_lat_longs.csv","w") stops.each do |stop| code = stop[1] easting = stop[4] northing = stop[5] url = "http://www.uk-postcodes.com/eastingnorthing.php?easting=#{easting}&northing=#{northing}" location = JSON.parse(open(url).read) puts "Processing #{stop[3]}: #{location['lat']}, #{location['lng']}" out << [code, location['lat'],location['lng']] end out.close
I’ve uploaded the file with mapping from bus stop code to lat/long to github as well.
Peter Hicks has a blog post showing another way of doing this using just Ruby code but I couldn’t get the ‘proj4′ gem to install and I didn’t fancy shaving that yak when I had another solution which worked.
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David Turner
