[Talk-transit] bus route/relations done right

[Ed Loach]

David wrote:

> To these I added the ways in no particular order, then 
> the stops from origin to destination, and then the stops 
> on the opposite side of the road going back the other way.  
> Adding stops like this keeps them in order when displayed 
> in a list (eg: 7 via Brighstone on öpnvkarte, on relation 
> browser, whole route on öpnvkarte).  There are sporadic 
> proposals to make this more logical, such as by adding an 
> increasing count to each stop for any particular route, 
> but nothing concrete at the moment.

I think adding the nodes in the order you do makes sense. Many of
the sporadic proposals seemed to pre-date the API 0.6 update when
the members of the relations became ordered. I think there have been
discussions on this list about the ways, and one suggestion (IIRC)
was to add each direction of a route that goes back and forth as
separate relations and make a single relation containing both (can't
remember what the names were, but something like line and route). In
this instance every member of the "line" relation would have
forward/backward next to it, and the reverse "line" would have the
same ways with the opposite forward/backward. That seemed overly
complicated (though perhaps grudgingly I'll admit a logical model)
to me. So I've not done much with bus routes yet. But in theory you
could still add all the ways that the bus follows on its route in
the order it follows them, including a way in a relation twice if it
travels it more than once. But ordering is still awkward. Probably
not currently possible in Potlatch, but the relation editing
interface in JOSM is getting better over time.

Ed