[Talk-transit] Tagging 'Bus Stop Areas'

[Thomas Wood]

Hi list,
In the process of writing the converter for the NaPTAN dataset, I've
come across a need for how to tag areas in which a bus may stop.

The most obvious of these is the 'Hail and Ride' sections of routes,
where a bus may stop at any point on the road if requested. Searching
the wiki, it seems that adding the way to a route relation and marking
it's role as 'hail' was one approach suggested by the person dealing
with the QROTI transit import of the Brisbane area
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/QROTI).

NaPTAN also allows for a Flexible Zone type of stopping area, it only
describes this as "Flexible zone, with an area footprint.". NaPTAN
seems to explicitly differentiate it from the standard concept that
NaPTAN has of Stop Areas, where many stopping points in a locality are
grouped together for interchanges.
Does anyone have any idea what a flexible zone is? And if so, how we'd
represent it in OSM.

-- 
Regards,
Thomas Wood
(Edgemaster)