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
Commit
f8b9d5f
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…
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.
commit f8b9d5f
Will do: Astro prototype with a page per route (changelog + PDF links), screenshots when it's up.
Prototype is up: index + 3,082 route pages, each a timeline linking to the Gazette PDF. Route 29 reads nicely: กรุงเทพ-เลย → เชียงคาน → ปากชม. Built from titles only for now, so ~3.1k notices with routes only in the body aren't linked yet.
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?