Use a real geocoder - Githubissues

grote / Transportr

Free Public Transport Assistant without Ads or Tracking

https://transportr.app

GNU General Public License v3.0

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Use a real geocoder #529

Open ADepic opened 6 years ago

ADepic commented 6 years ago

Instead of dealing with search issues due to faulty libraries or data in public-transport-enabler, it is just easier to simply use a proper osm geocoder such as pelias, photon or nominatim.

This will fix a lot of problems.

grote commented 6 years ago

Can you maybe elaborate on the "lots of problems" that exist at the moment?

It is generally better to state a problem before proposing a solution.

grote commented 6 years ago

Well, #476 and #441 are due to the API being broken. An external address search won't solve those.

But I see that this makes sense if the user's area isn't covered well by the API's address search. However, how to find out if that's the case?

Even if you can do that or always use an external address search, there's new problems with that:

Some providers can't search from custom addresses, e.g. #527
How to limit the scope of the address search to the area covered by the current API?
How to prevent the privacy impact by leaking the user's location to yet another third party?

ADepic commented 6 years ago

To limit the scope of the search to what's in the current network you have chosen, well, I don't think that is possible. But I think people are sensible enough to realise when they have searched for something outside of the scope. Returning an error should be enough.

As for privacy, I think you should host your own instance ( which is necessary for pelias ) . I don't know your stance on this, so please share your opinion/view. I don't know the costs and difficulties with hosting a server .

As for some providers not working, I don't know why that is the case. Surely transportr (or some library it uses) calculates the walking directions to the nearest / best bus stop?

grote commented 6 years ago

I think people are sensible enough to realise when they have searched for something outside of the scope.

I am not so sure. People seem to have a hard time understanding the different data sources (APIs) and their coverage.

As for privacy, I think you should host your own instance

Sorry, unlikely to happen. I already host a Navitia server myself for my own region and have barely enough time to maintain it.