What turns up when you Google "Amman Bus Map"?

If you Google variations of “خريطة باصات عمان” or Amman Bus Map, far from coming back with nothing, you get something in the range of 10 million hits, though as far as I can tell, none of them are particularly helpful. There are pictures of busses, maps of the London Tube, and other odds and ends from Google’s attic. There are a few tourist-oriented descriptions of how to take the bus between Jordanian cities, but very little information, verbal or visual, on Amman’s actual busses.

10,200,000 results from Google

When I discuss the project, particularly with people outside of the developing world, I frequently get asked why the government itself has not compiled this information before. I just finished an excellent article by the researchers behind the Digital Matatus project, detailing their use of MyTracks and similar programs to develop their map. Here are their thoughts on why paratransit and public transit information is not more readily available:

Why is good data for paratransit lacking?First, many operators in these networks are small businesses that may not see the immediate benefit of data and have the means to collect it. The informal and often unsanctioned nature of these operations may lead owners to keep their activities hidden from government oversight. Often times, governments themselves may instead be uninterested in these systems – seeing them as “chaotic” or too complex to address, they often do not see value in having operators collect data. Worse, some government and industry actors collude and mutually benefit from the lack of transparency – the importance of these networks along with their opacity presents an environment all too friendly to corruption. When government agencies do collect data, they often hire consultants who may do so in a proprietary manner or a methodology that differs from global standards. Indeed, NGOs and consultants hired by governments often create transport data to inform critical urban developments, including large scale infrastructure projects that are reshaping the destinies of cities in fundamental ways. However, this data and the methodology for creating it are often not shared (Williams et al. forthcoming). Finally, the informal and flexible nature of paratransit makes them highly variable and erratic—a serious challenge to data collection.

That final point on the difficulties of gathering data on fluctuating transit systems may be truer in Nairobi than in Amman where routes are a little more fixed, but as a whole that paragraph encapsulates a number of the roadblocks to getting good public transportation data. There are a lot of projects that need doing in Amman, and this may just be farther down the priority list, playing into what Klopp et. al identify as a potential undervaluing of this kind of information. Capacity is a problem the world over, particularly for developing governments, but it is cool to see how cheap GPS technology is making these kinds of projects doable, supplementing the work of municipal governments at a low cost.