[Talk-transit] All about bus stops

[Brian Quinion]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Shaun McDonald
<shaun at shaunmcdonald.me.uk> wrote:
>> My feeling would be that a bus route relation would need to include an
>> ordered list of bus-stops and a seperate ordered list of ways to allow
>> for buses that take strange (i.e. non-direct) routes and buses that go
>> both ways along a road on their way in and out of an area without
>> making the editing horrible or forcing people to split ways at every
>> bus stop.
>
> What I'm thinking is that you put the way, and then any bus stops
> along that way (if any), then the next way that the bus goes along.

That would work too.  My only probably with it was that it might
encourage people to split the way at each bus stop because it is so
close to the 'way, stop, way, stop, ....' layout which would be the
natural choice without the technical restrictions of the data
structure.  It's also more problematic is someone later splits the way
for some other reason (e.g. speed limit) because they need to be
reordered.

> What happens for each direction of the bus? One relation for each
> direction?

That certainly wouldn't be neat.  There are routes here where it goes
down the same road twice in each direction (i.e. total of 4 times down
on road) because it does a loop inside a housing estate on both
inbound and outbound routes.  It's a freak - but presumably we need to
be able to cope with edge cases.

> The ordering brings the ability to have the same way multiple times.

Hum, this is a good quest, does it add this?  I can image it getting
missed as a required option very easily if no-one is thinking about
it!