[Talk-transit] Naming concepts

[Stephen Sprunk]

On 2016-10-31 17:59, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Stephen Sprunk <stephen at sprunk.org> writes:
> 
>> I should point out that "bus lines", "cruise lines", "air lines",
>> etc. are plural when talking about one company (e.g. American
>> Airlines) because they operate a collection of individual lines
>> between specific locations, such as New York-Los Angeles.
> 
> But one would say 'Holland America is a cruise line".

In formal writing, I'd probably correct that to "Holland America is a 
cruise line operator", but I'm not pedantic enough to do that in 
informal writing, much less speech.

> So it's messy.

True, but English is a messy language; things have a habit of morphing 
into forms that are de jure incorrect, yet so many people repeat them 
that they become de facto correct over time.  We joke about how some 
non-natives speak English "better" than us, yet correctness just doesn't 
"sound right"; one of the hardest things to learn is speaking 
incorrectly like we natives do!

For instance, "than us" above should really be "than we [do]", but if 
you actually say "than we" without the "do", native speakers will 
probably think you're pretentious--or a non-native speaker.

>>> I'm still not 100% following.  In the wiki table, is concept number 1
>>> just a name for the collection of route variants, and basically the
>>> name that the bus company (agency/whatever) uses?  I would call that
>>> "bus_route_name" then, with a name, and perhaps bus_route_ref for
>>> just the numberish part, along with bus_route_operator.  This is
>>> making it like highway ref tags.
>> 
>> Incidentally, this drives me nuts about transit.  If the agencies
>> actually published the names that way (e.g. variants 42A and 42B,
>> perhaps with the shared portions just labeled 42), it'd make their
>> services a lot easier to use; today, it's very easy to accidentally
>> get on a "42 to Foo Street" when you actually needed a "42 to Bar
>> Avenue".  When "via"s get involved, it's even worse.  Who came up with
>> this nonsense and thought it was a good idea?
> 
> I agree, and the for the most part the agency near me (MBTA,
> www.mbta.com) is good about this, having two route numbers for the two
> ways the bus can run.  But then they publish a "74/75" schedule that
> shows information about 74 and 75 since they are mostly the same and
> departures are interleaved.  I don't think there's any way to totally
> win here.

That makes sense since they're obviously related, at least if the shared 
segment is significant, yet it recognizes a clear difference between the 
two services outside the shared segment.  Seems like a win to me.

Note that I'm comparing that to using a single line label, which makes a 
schedule like this much harder to understand that it should be:
http://dart.org/schedules/w019no.htm
http://dart.org/schedules/w019so.htm

It's one thing for some trips (particularly the first and last few of 
the service day) to not run the entire length of a line, but when you 
branch at one or both ends, i.e. serving mutually exclusive subsets of 
stops, calling it a single line seems rather questionable.

S

-- 
Stephen Sprunk      "Those people who think they know everything
CCIE #3723         are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
K5SSS                                             --Isaac Asimov