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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…

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?

Yes, please do. Check https://www.openlawdatathailand.org/ for the open dataset.

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?

On text: old PDFs are image-only scans, no text layer. The 2021 reform one has real text. Dataset OCR starts 2002. So the text era is ~2002+, roughly 3k notices. Notes are in NOTES.md in the repo.

Correction: the 2002+ text era is 2,462 notices, not ~3k.

Can we make like a database of a changelog of each bus route? So given a route, we can see when it was established, when was it revised, etc. with deep links into the PDF.

On it. First pass: parse route numbers out of the titles (no OCR needed) and see how far that gets us.

Thanks. Prototype an Astro website, and send screenshots.

Known wart, see the Bangkok route 1 shot: air-con ปอ. 1 and ordinary 1 share a page, and the 2021 reform's numbers (4-70E, 5-1) are in the same list. Next could be: split those, then use text layers for the body-only notices. Which first?

Wart? Elaborate pls

Also: I show 1978 as "ปอ.1 renumbered to 12", but ปอ.1 still exists in 1982, so it's probably a split (Sukhumvit vs New Phetchaburi). Titles alone can't tell; the body would.

Hm, air-conditioned routes and non-air-conditioned routes are separate routes? Are you really sure? Maybe start analyzing text layers?