News — 04 February, 2016

Passengers created the public transportation map of Managua

Great progress on a crowd-sourced public transportation map for Managua! Through our crowd-funding initiative, we were able to raise $6,212 dollars and with this they enabled us to print the city's bus map 40,000 times.

We made great progress on a crowd-sourced public transportation map for Managua!

 

Over seventy generous donours supported us, through our crowd-funding initiative, to raise $6,212 dollars and with this they enabled us to print the city's bus map 40,000 times. Yesterday, members of the OpenStreetMap Nicaragua cummunity handed over the collaboratively created and printed public transportation maps to the people.

 

Managua became Central America's first capital with a complete transportation map. And only the community made this possible:

 

Over the last two years, we, citizens of Managua and the nearby Ciudad Sandino have empowered ourselves; learning and mapping the public transportation network together. We used resources available to us: new technologies and Free and Open Software, in particular the OpenStreetMap project and it’s ecosystem. In this way, more than 150 citizens collaborated in this gigantic task to map all routes and bus stops of the two cities.

 

Together with the creative designers from Ninfus Design Studio, the core group created a paper map from the transit data collected by citizen volunteers.

The product of the effort is also available online. This map could only have been made with everyone's help, so it is a logical consequence that its data is also accessible for the general population. The information can be downloaded in different file formats, so that anybody can build upon, change it, make it better, create new products and give new solutions to the people.