[Talk-transit] Proposal for a new transport tag

Bryce McKinlay bmckinlay at gmail.com
Wed Feb 29 16:03:48 GMT 2012


Personally, I think adding transit schedule data to OSM is not a good idea.

Firstly, in many areas, schedules are highly variable over time, so
this sort of information tends to become obsolete soon after it is
added.

Secondly, GTFS is already a good, widely used, open format for transit
schedules. Introducing a new set of tags for this stuff in OSM would
be like reinventing the wheel. In many cases GTFS data is provided and
kept up-to-date by the transit providers themselves.  How about tags
that link public transport relations to the appropriate GTFS URL
instead?

If its just having a service frequency hint for renderers that is
required, then I'd suggest keeping it very simple. For example,
"transport_frequency=frequent",
"transport_frequency=occasional,no_weekend_service" or similar.

Bryce


On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Janko Mihelić <janjko at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 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 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 or in the route
> direction/variant. 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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>



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