[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Public Transport v3

[John Doe]

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> Given that iD still seems to scramble sorted routes in some circumstances, one should not assume that editors will correctly handle any changes we make. I might be being unfair to iD here, I didn't check the route was still sorted before I added a spur, so maybe somebody else doing something that didn't directly affect the route using another editor scrambled it.
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Could you please try to replicate that and report it to the iD developers? Sounds like a pretty serious bug, if it is that.

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> Given recent comments on the proposal's talk page, I doubt it will better represent reality because it's the router that determines the fine details.
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> I want to see exact routes, not close approximations.
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While many others have, in the process of this proposal, questioned the need to map exact routes at all (given the presence of platforms), I have always wanted to map canonical routes as closely as I can.

> A new housing estate with two connections to the existing road system could cause the bus to be re-routed.

Sounds a little odd - would a router really route a bus on a highway=residential or highway=service?

But, be that as it may, your response helped me see two things -
1. It will be helpful to have a route visualizer in editors that can preempt ambiguities.
2. Hail and ride routes longer than last-mile services really do suffer under this schema.

> Which is fine if they're alternative ways of mapping bus routes. But the proposers seem to want to make this the one and only way of doing things.

I reiterate that I initially wanted it to be just that - an additional way to map. But I also don't want to see it go the way of PTv2, where some consumers still don't support the new schema even after 8 years of being asked to. And I definitely don't want ways in routes where there's no need for them, but someone decides to add them 'for completeness' (for instance, so many appear to have difficulty in comprehending that stop positions in PTv2 are optional 🤦♀️), oblivious to the maintenance issues.

Which gives me the following idea - would it help you if only routes with hail_and_ride=yes were permitted to have ways? For selective hail and ride, we can use the via roles as currently written in the proposal. That lets you use ways where they are most important (longer, completely hail and ride routes), and keeps them out of where they're a nuisance.

(Routes with hail_and_ride=yes could still opt to omit ways and use points, which would be better for shorter routes.)

Tangential comments -
1. "long-distance [interstate?], few official stops, only stops at official stops" - this proposal doesn't merely 'work' for them, it is absolutely essential for them - one only has to try creating a route relation for a national train to know why 😄 I agree with you that passengers in those situations don't care about the intricacies of the route as long as the stops are being served and the ETAs are more or less accurate.
2. This also works well for "intra-city, many official stops, only stop at official stops". The stops are so frequent that you probably won't need to add any via points in most cases.