[Talk-transit] Proposal for a new transport tag

[Janko Mihelić]

Hello,

The problem with rendering transit lines right now is that the busy lines
are rendered the same as the lines that go a few times a day. Those
differences between lines should be seen right away, but we don't have that
information in the database right now.

I agree that the best solution would be to have the whole timetable for
different transit lines, but this is often not possible and very hard to
maintain. Transiki <https://github.com/SteveC/transiki> gave us some hope
that this could be manageable, but unfortunately the project was shut down.

I propose a temporary middle solution. Every bus route relation could have
a tag similar to the
opening_hours<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:opening_hours>tag.
This way we could know if a line is only active on weekends, or if it
is a night line. Or maybe it only runs in the morning and in the evening.

We could upgrade this tag, and put a number of trips in each time period.
This can be an estimate, a trip more or less a day is not much.

It would look like this:

Only ferquency:
*transport_frequency*=t5
this means that a bus route has 5 trips a day.

Only days:
*transport_frequency*=Sa-Su
this bus route only goes on weekends

Only time:
*transport_frequency*=00:00-04:00
Night line

A little more information:
*transport_frequency***=Mo-Fr 08:00-23:00 t30; Sa 08:00-22:00 t25
30 trips a day from Monday till Friday, first trip at 8 in the morning,
last at 10 in the evening. Similar for Saturday.

And so on. I added a "t" in front of the number of trips so it is easier to
see, maybe it is not needed. Or maybe this could be done in a completely
different way.

This tag could be added in the route
master<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Public_Transport#Route_master>or
in the route
direction/variant<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Public_Transport#Route_direction.2Fvariant>.
Renderers could draw the lines dashed if they are not very frequent, or
black if they are night lines.

Even rough public transport routers could be made using this information.

What do you guys think? (Should I have put this in the wiki first?)

Janko Mihelić
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Janjko
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