Grab a drink while you wait for the bus

August 20, 2015

I always found it fascinating that there are several bus stops in Hungary which are called “{municipality name}, Cooperative Liquor Store” (szövetkezeti italbolt in Hungarian). It might get somewhat lost in translation that such a name very much reminds the reader of the socialist era it was given to the bus stop.

A man waiting for his drink in a pub somewhere in Hungary, 1968. *FORTEPAN/Katalin Erdei. Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0*

At the time of this project, turistautak.hu was clearly the highest quality database for openly accessible geographical data from Hungary. However, they did not have an API, so I manually downloaded the coordinates of the relevant bus stops and munged the data in Excel.

Name plate of a Cooperative Liquor Store in Szentpéterfölde, Hungary. *Photo by the Author, 2009. Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0*

Using QGIS, I created the following map:

I also shared an interactive version on Google Maps to allow a more free-form browsing (including the option to download the data in KML format).