Doing some little research on how routes for buses (and other fixed-route transport) in Thailand is set and evolves over time. From my understanding so far, it kinda started with this PDF from 1954: https://ratchakitcha.soc.go.th/documents/1156537.pdf
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Here. That's the Transport Act B.E. 2497 (1954): §12 lets the committee set routes and how many operators get licensed, via Gazette notice. So the route announcements after it should show how routes changed. Want me to dig into those?
Found it in the Gazette dataset: ~8,000 route notices from the transport control boards. 1955-03-22 is the first Bangkok-Thonburi one: https://ratchakitcha.soc.go.th/documents/1163349.pdf. Snag: OCR text only covers 2002+, older ones are scans. Want me to OCR them?
We'll eventually get to that, and let's use OCR text with text layer in PDF where possible initially. Let's get a general sense of what we're looking at first.
BTW, some preliminary spoilers:
That act will be replaced by this
https://ratchakitcha.soc.go.th/documents/1421074.pdf…
General sense, ~8k route notices: 1954 committee 838 (1955–79). After the 1979 act: central board 2,533 (1980–now), provincial boards 4,593 across 80 provinces. Peaks in the 80s–00s, then a 2020s burst (the reform). Mostly "revise" 3.9k, "establish" 3.1k, "cancel" 850.
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