Request: Expand the Buses Section
ScriptForAll opened this issue · comments
I've noticed that in the Campo Grande's buses section there're missing some operators from the list (e.g. Mafresense, Barraqueiro). It would be quite useful if that section were an extensive list.
Would it be easy to implement it if said information were easily available?
What operators should be included?
@brazanet can you chime in on this one? What was the criteria to decide which bus services to include? I'm pretty sure we opted to omit long-distance ones (so much so that in the Portuguese locale the button to see the info says "Carreiras Urbanas"), but this is something we can discuss again.
The data for the buses is here, as manually produced HTML files which are displayed by the relevant sections of the app with little to no modification (there are some restrictions on what HTML can be used since these are not rendered by a proper browser but parsed into much more limited SpannableStrings in Android). Like the rest of the information for station connections and trivia, these are part of the "extra content", which is not part of the core network map, and is downloaded and cached as needed (or the "Download extra content" button on the About section can be used to download it all at once). The same HTMLs are used to produce parts of the station profiles on the Perturbações website, e.g. https://perturbacoes.pt/s/pt-ml-cg.
There is a disadvantage to extending these sections to include more types of services: because they need to be manually updated, more services from more operators equals more schedules to check for changes (and unfortunately, it is my impression that some operators are not particularly good at updating the info they provide online, at least, this was the case a few years ago). It is already hard to keep up with changes from urban operators like Carris, I'm not sure we'd be able to ensure the quality/freshness of the info we'd provide for long-distance operators.
Indeed the criteria chosen was the kind of service that a route does, in this case we picked the local commuter buses only. Registering every single bus route, either it be international, long distance or medium distance, was deemed not worthy as the sheer amount of different companies would make keeping the list updated an enormous task with little benefit for the users. The bus companies from the Barraqueiro group have a mixed service between local commuter buses and long range buses, that's why they weren't added initially.