[Talk-us] School bus routes?

[Alan Mintz]

At 2011-04-10 12:43, Richard Welty wrote:
>On 4/10/11 1:39 PM, Alan Mintz wrote:
>>At 2011-04-10 09:42, Nathan Edgars II wrote:
>>>I came across a relation for a school bus: 
>>>http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/239393
>>>Isn't this a little too much detail for OSM?
>>
>>A single relation? Really? We map lots of private-access things, like 
>>driveways and access roads, private clubs, etc. As far as volume, 
>>fighting with limits caused by import of tens of thousands of individual 
>>non-streams in the desert, landuse shapes that were over-digitized by an 
>>order of magnitude, individual trees, etc. all seem more realistic things 
>>to focus on limiting, no?
>>
>>Use of OSM by schools is a great use of both their and our resources. The 
>>only note I'd be sending the user is to encourage them to import more of 
>>their bus routes and show others how to do so.
>but they do vary from year to year.

As do commercial bus routes, at least based on the number of stickers with 
changes on them I see on signage around here. In fact, I'll bet that's on 
the rise as more/easy analysis of passenger counts is available to 
operators through integration with GIS.


>  i worry about importing such data then
>failing to maintain it. it's very subject to bit rot.

At the yearly level, true of any temporal data that we enthusiastically 
map, like tenants of strip malls*, business opening hours, speed limits, 
and turn restrictions.

It just seems like OSM is well-suited for use by schools. They have to 
maintain data like bus routes, campus maps, etc., it's to both their and 
their communities' advantage to make it free and accessible, and it spreads 
the gospel of OSM.


*The stats on new small business failures are truly depressing.

--
Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.net>