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I am trying to find a list of all public transportation/transit locations like subway stations, airports, bus terminals and bus stops for USA. Only major transit locations are required, rural bus stops are not necessary. This will be used to provide the nearest transit stations at a particular place (for a buy/sell listing), similar to whwat Yelp did for its listings.

Yelp's Transit Details

Nearest Transit Station:
Haymarket Station - Outbound (Orange Line)
Haymarket Station - Inbound (Orange Line)
Congress St @ Haymarket Sta (191, 192, 193, 325, 326, 4, 92, 93)

Any suggestions? Does OSM have such information? Could OSM contributors have included the major transit locations in America, and is it currently at least comprehensive in the major cities?

And what do I have to do to clean the data before I can import it into PostGIS and QGIS/ArcGIS?

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  • Can you define "all"? If you really want absolutely every location, I think the problem is intractable.
    – BradHards
    Mar 31, 2013 at 21:35
  • As a start, knowing the locations of the bus terminals and stops and the service numbers will suffice. Do such data set exists or must we approach each transportation company and request for it?
    – Nyxynyx
    Mar 31, 2013 at 21:38
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    I don't think you've thought this through - think about all those rural bus services for schools and such - most of them don't have "stop locations" - its just "outside the Smith house". OSM only had information that someone thought was important to include, which may not match your needs. Can you please edit your question (clock just below your question) with more detail about what you intend to use the information for, what fidelity you need, and why you've decided OSM is the solution?
    – BradHards
    Mar 31, 2013 at 21:44
  • I have added more information to the question. The transit station data will be used to search for the nearest subway/bus to get to a particular location, similar to how Yelp does it.
    – Nyxynyx
    Mar 31, 2013 at 21:50
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    Have you looked at the agencies that publish Google Transit Feeds? Mar 31, 2013 at 22:32

2 Answers 2

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In general, you can't get "all" data - OSM relies on volunteered data, and you can't reasonably know how complete it is. It is likely to be better (more complete, more up-to-date) in some areas than others. It still isn't easy to answer your question, because you're pointing to another site rather than telling us what you really need ("so why not just use yelp?"), but a combination of OSM and some other public data (e.g. the GTFS suggestion from Kirk) is probably a reasonable start.

If you need more data, then you'll obviously have to do (potentially commercial) arrangements with the owners of the data. Note that this may not be compatible with the OSM license.

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In addition to what @Kirk Kuykendall and @BradHards have said, consider trying the GTFS exchange site I know it's a google based information for their transit feeds; however, everything is well documented and you probably can reform the data to your needs.

From their site:

About GTFS Data Exchange

This site is designed to help developers and transit agencies efficiently share and retrieve GTFS data. GTFS-data-exchange helps eliminate the time between feed publication by a transit agency and when the developer is alerted to it's presence. This is accomplished by per-agency RSS feeds that developers and other GTFS consumers subscribe to.

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