You can now find where and how close your nearest bus stops are online, using open data published by Translink.
At the moment, you're not able to find where your nearest bus stop is on Google Maps. But thanks to the locations of 15,637 bus stops (Metro and Ulsterbus) across Northern Ireland being made available through OpenDataNI, ODI Belfast at NICVA have created a service that can find the nearest 5 bus stops and return their information in page.
The website uses your computer or mobile location, your typed postcode, or a clicked-on location in the map to query the bus stops dataset. It determines what the 5 closest bus stops are and plots the markers for the stops in the map. It also displays the information for how far away (as the crow flies) each of them are, and what direction the service operates in.
If organisations (businesses, charities, community centres) want to add this information to their 'Find Us' page so that customers know where to get off the bus (with help from the new announcements on board), this functionality could be extended so that the service can be queried from an external website. It can also help identify accessible journeys for people with mobility issues where a long distance to walk from a bus stop may be more difficult.
As more data is added, its possible that this could include route numbers in future. The source code is open to anyone who wants to use or build on and improve it. If you want to know more about the app or what we do with open data, contact ODI Belfast.
