We're excited to announce that official Transport for London and National Rail icons will now be featured on Mapbox Streets at rail stations throughout Great Britain.
New icons make neighborhoods more immediately familiar on the already data rich maps, but simplifying the rich OpenStreetMap data required a concerted effort from both our data team and cartographers. In many cases stations are represented as buildings, and other times as a single point. In yet other instances, one station will have multiple points, with each representing a platform or entrance. If two rail networks service the same station, that station might have on point for each rail service.
Many nodes for just two stations - King's Cross and St. Pancras
We wanted to respect the local knowledge that makes OpenStreetMap what the rich database that it is. But this meant that in a case like King's Cross St. Pancras (pictured above), we didn't want to just delete extra nodes that meant something to the local openStreetMappers on the ground. Instead, we decided to process as much of the data after importing. Young and AJ came up with lot of advanced logic to group multiple station nodes into one point and dynamically generate different combinations of network icons. But before this could happen, we needed to make sure rail stations in Great Britain all had the appropriate network= tags.
Matt and Jue sprinted to make sure all London Underground, London Overground, and Docklands Light Railway stations were tagged as part of their respective network(s), taking care that a station might belong to multiple networks. Ruben and Nate did more of a marathon to ensure that stations National Rail network throughout Great Britain were well tagged. Wikipedia was our main resource, and an incredibly consistent one, with in depth information on what networks a station belonged to, whether or not it was disused or serviced a heritage railway.
To learn more about what went into adding the new rail icons, be sure to read AJ's post on the juicy technical details of what goes into processing the data after import. All of this means comes as part of our ongoing efforts to improve MapBox Streets, and we hope to implement more locally- relevant features in cities all over the world in the coming months.
