Mexico City’s most popular mode of public transportation is a fleet of 30,000 minibuses that make around 14 million trips every day. Due to the scale and dynamism of the network, the megalopolis lacks an updated map of this complex system.

Mexico City’s government coordinated an effort that included multiple government offices, civil society and NGO’s and gave way to Mapatón CDMX: the city’s first ludic mapping festival. During a period of two weeks, citizens were invited to map bus routes through an app in their cell phones.

Nearly 1,700 unique routes were mapped (~81,751 km, the same amount of kilometers as turning the Earth 1.2 times) and the database is now accesible to the public in GTFS format. A day after it was published, entrepreneurs in Mexico City started coming up with applications that use the public API and datasets generated in Mapatón.

Mapatón is only a first step in the challenge that is to gather more quality data in megalopolises around the world.