On New York Turf has a subway map with details of subway routes and subway entrances. When zoomed out the network is visible and when zoomed in one can see the details of the actual stations and the exact locations where one can enter and leave each station.
Much of the original information used on this site was already available on printed posters within the station and this information was photographed and digitized by volunteers to make it conveniently available for pre-trip planning purposes [1].
There are still some outlying stations for which details are needs and contributors are invited to submit photographs of the maps at these stations[2] and contributors are also invited to add translations of the English text to make the site available in more languages[3]. Additional information is being collected by volunteers for each station on dedicated wiki pages[4].
Does this matter? Yes I think it does. Public transport journey planners need considerable amounts of detail of this nature in order to give good results, and it is likely to be prohibitively expensive to collect and maintain this commercially. There is a new CEN standard IFOPT which is able to contain details of entrances, escalators and lifts for stations however the new challenge this creates is how to populate it. The New York Subway Map project is a good indicator that volunteers can will actively engage with such a project or indeed set it up themselves if it doesn’t exist.
From a copyright perspective the data available from this project would appear to be a derived work based on information provided by the authorities on the posters at the station entrances and also from Google, their mapping provider and various volunteer contributors. Consideration of copyright issues would need to be considered before collecting data that could be exported and used without restrictions and this may require a more detailed original survey.
Following the lead of community supported projects such as OpenStreetMap commercial companies are now also tapping into their communities as sources of data. TeleAtlas is making good use of user contributed data from Tom Tom users [5] as are Google with their Map Maker product[6].
