[Talk-transit] Public transport workshop in Germany

Mon Jun 1 10:37:08 BST 2009

In message <AF96A1BD-A17B-4878-88BE-5CD4DA91F038 at itoworld.com>
          Peter Miller <peter.miller at itoworld.com> wrote:

> On 1 Jun 2009, at 08:41, Roger Slevin wrote:

>> Google take a feed of NaPTAN stop point data – and hence something
>> like Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester is a mass of them.
>>
>> NaPTAN does have the facility to hold stoparea data – but the data
>> is not fully populated (as it is not useful when presenting journey
>> itineraries to the public – or local information systems have their
>> own way of creating such stopareas on the fly without requiring the
>> data to be held explicitly in NaPTAN records).
>>
>> We did experiment with using stopareas with Google – but the need to
>> link the data to Google Transit for specific journey planning meant
>> that you were told to catch a  bus at, say, Piccadilly Gardens –
>> rather than from stop 10 at Piccadilly Gardens ... and for
>> itineraries to be useful, the “stop 10” bit is quite important!

> Interesting. Fyi, I have up-loaded images from a couple of places in
> the UK where Stop Areas/Stop Places are used. Notice that in some
> places there are nested stop places. For our purposes we can consider
> Stop Place and Stop Area to be referring to the same thing, however
> the correct technical term in CEN for the stuff on the ground is a
> Stop Place.

> London
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterito/3584182693/

> Leeds
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterito/3584989420/

> There are times when the hierarchy is useful - for example one might
> first ask to go from Manchester to London, and then be offered routes
> from Manchester Piccadilly or Manchester Oxford Road to London
> Victoria Coach Station or London Euston, and then finally when one has
> chosen the actual journey one might be told to use Platform 10 from
> Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station. Similarly for large bus/coach
> interchanges. For some bus/coach/rail interchanges one doesn't
> actually know which Access will be used until shortly before the
> vehicle departs so one can only give the station itself as the
> starting point.

That is where a NaPTAN BCQ stop type comes in! But let's leave that 
for now.

> I do think that if we should accommodate this richer information where
> it is available and where people want to built it and then people will
> start using it for creative things, such as reducing the clutter on
> zoomed out maps (Google just ignores bus stops as one zooms out to
> stop it getting unmanageable, something which would not be ok for  a
> bus-centric map).

> We could also consider using tools to automatically build stop places
> and associate Accesses with Stopping Places to stop it being too
> complicated for mappers.
> 

In UK where StopAreas have been created this has usually been to 
define interchange points between services.  Local Authorities have 
rightly concentrated on the StopPoint data, expecially where their 
journey planning systems do not use explicitly defined StopAreas for 
interchanges.

If StopAreas/StopPlaces are to be used to create better maps then this 
will be an incentive for local authorities to consider improving the 
StopArea data, and help to do so from OSM may be appreciated.

There has been some reference to guessing the centre point of a 
StopArea.  The NaPTAN StopArea.csv includes coordinates for a central 
point of the StopArea so this could be used in mapping and improved 
where necessary.

The transport profession has itself been trying to keep up with the 
changes in terminology and the difference between StopPlaces and 
StopAreas will be another.   It does help in the long term.

>> From: talk-transit-bounces at openstreetmap.org
>> [mailto:talk-transit-bounces at openstreetmap.org
>> ] On Behalf Of Frankie Roberto
>> Sent: 01 June 2009 08:34
>> To: talk-transit at openstreetmap.org
>> Subject: Re: [Talk-transit] Public transport workshop in Germany
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 8:05 AM, Peter Miller <peter.miller at itoworld.com
>>> wrote:
>>
>>> The current situation with bus stops is more messy. (Just see
>>> Birmigham which seems to entirely consist of bus stops.) While
>>> stop places in the new schema allow to clean this up a bit, again,
>>> the renderer only has the choice to either paint two many
>>> symbols (all access points or all stopping points) or badly
>>> guess where to put the single point.
>> Which rendering view are you using? for the main Mapnik view on
>> openstreetmap there are no bus stops until one zooms in to zoom 17 at
>> which point there are certainly lots of bus stops (accesses).
>>
>> It's good to see that we're not the only ones with this problem,
>> though.  Google Maps seems to render a huge number of bus stops now
>> that they've imported public transit data for the uk. See
>> http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=manchester,
>> +uk&sll=37.579413,-95.712891&sspn=30.958234,75.234375&ie=UTF8&ll=53.47
>> 9797,-2.239387&spn=0.005708,0.018368&z=16
>>  for instance.
>>
>> That view contains two bus stations (by Piccadilly Gardens and the
>> coach station by Chorlton Street), and yet both a rendered simply as
>> a mass of access points, rather than a singular named node (which
>> would be more useful).
>>
>> So if we can solve this problem, we'll be one up on Google! :-)
>>
>> Frankie
>>
>> P.S It's good to see that platforms are now rendering on Mapnik (see
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.477811&lon=-2.243247&zoom=18&laye
>> rs=B000FTF)
>> , however I note that it's not coping well with platforms that are
>> areas (as closed ways with area=yes).  Having blue arrows on the
>> tramlines that are marked with oneway=yes is also a little odd.
>>
>> --
>> Frankie Roberto
>> Experience Designer, Rattle
>> 0114 2706977
>> http://www.rattlecentral.com
>>
>> Sent from Manchester, Greater Manchester, United Kingdom
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>> Talk-transit at openstreetmap.org
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