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Quest for Station Entrance Data

November 2nd, 2005

I have figured out how to more accurately represent stations, by including each stations entrance. My simple approach is to just plot each stations entrance as a marker of the station.

The tricky part is getting the location data for each station entrance. I’m hoping I will not have to go through and manually figure out the geocoordinates for each station entrance, but because wmetro.com doesn’t provide accurate entrance information it appears I will be forced to go through this process manually :-( If anyone has any suggestions about how to get this data, I’d love to find out otherwise it looks like over the next month or so I’ll be building this data manually.

Since, I’m a frequent user of Farragut West, I figured that station out and you’ll notice it appears on the map now twice, since it has two entrances. The search algorithm handles this correctly, so if you search for the nearest station to “1590 I St. NW, Washington, DC” for example you’ll get Farragut West now instead of Farragut North. Now that may change again once I finish plotting the alternate entrances to Farragut North, but for now it’s at least more accurate then before.

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  1. todd
    November 19th, 2005 at 18:29 | #1

    Definitely! be great to split this work up. I’d preferr something like MPL.

  2. tom
    November 19th, 2005 at 17:43 | #2

    I suggest stationmasters.com. They don’t have the data in an easily usable form, but it’s at least accurate. You’ll still have to manually geocode it, though. Let me know if you’d like to split up this task — it’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and provided you’re willing to release the result xml publicly, I’d be glad to help out.

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