Open data for stations and accessibility
While the iRail API has been getting quite some updates, we remained silent about our open data on stations. Mostly because there wasn’t really anything to talk about. Today is different.
What we had before
Before today, we provided a list of stations, with their ID, translations, coordinates and ‘importance’ (e.g., Brussels West would be less important than Brussels South). While this enabled a lot of people to create nice things, it isn’t enough. In the past, we’ve received questions about station addresses, and at UGent, research is being done to plan routes keeping accessibility and disabilities of travelers in mind. We didn’t have this data, while it’s clearly valuable.
And what we offer now
We have created a scraper to scrape every station page there is, based on our existing stations.csv file. The results are stored in facilities.csv. The following data is now publicly available:
- Address of the station
- If ticket vending machines are present
- If luggage lockers are present
- If there is free parking, taxi, bicycle parking, taxi, bluebike, bus, tram, metro
- If there are wheelchairs available,
- If there is a ramp to roll wheelchairs on a train
- If there are parking spots reserved for people with a disability
- Whether or not the platform is elevated, if escalators are present up and/or down, if there is an elevator on the platform
- If there is a hearing aid signal
- Opening hours for ticket sales
All code and data is open source in the irail/stations repository.
Now go create something awesome with it!
