Mapatón CDMX turned mapping Mexico City's unmapped minibuses into a points game

Fast Company reported in 2016 that Mexico City's pesero microbuses carry about 60% of transit trips, roughly 14 million a day on 29,000 buses and more than 1,500 routes, yet no accurate route data existed. Routes had sprung up organically, buses show generic signs rather than formal names, and a conventional survey would have been extremely expensive and slow.

A group of 35 collaborators from 12 organizations built Mapatón CDMX, an app that let riders share GPS data as they rode. Participants and teams who mapped the most routes won points, with tablets and cash prizes of up to 30,000 pesos (about $1,700). Because smartphone users cluster in certain areas, an algorithm kept recalculating point values so ignored routes were worth the most. To identify routes, users photographed the sign on the front of the bus when starting a ride.

Crowdsourcing spreads the cost of surveying a huge informal network across thousands of riders.

Dynamic scoring corrects for uneven smartphone ownership, which would otherwise leave some districts unmapped.

Photographing the sign sidesteps the lack of a standard route naming scheme.

A public contest with cash prizes makes mapping a competition rather than a chore.

When data is too costly to collect, make collecting it a game whose scoring points effort where the gaps are.

The game ran during the first two weeks of February 2016 and drew 3,594 participants who mapped 2,632 rides, which Fast Company called nearly the entire pesero system. The data was published at the end of February, and a hackathon produced an SMS service returning transit directions, which was being adopted by the city's Urban Management Agency, according to the article.