[Talk-us] importing bus stops

[Martijn van Exel]

Hi,

Sorry I had to focus on other things for the last few days, thank you all
for your input.

On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 10:03 PM, Gregory Arenius <gregory at arenius.com>wrote:

>
> I looked at the shapefiles  you linked to and didn't see any mailbox
> properties.  I'd be wary of using an attribute like that  to add mailbox
> nodes.  How do you tell the location of the box relative to the stop unless
> they make sure they're very close before they mark that attribute that yes.
>

Agreed, I'd have to find that out from UTA before applying that information
to any mapping onto OSM.

>
> Also, the file I looked at (SLC) only had null value for shelter and
> bench.  Do the updated ones actually have some values there.  Do you know
> what UTA is referring to in the CURB and GUTTER attributes?  Again, the
> file I looked at only had zeros there.  I always add shelter and bench
> information to the stops I tag.  I also use a tag called ticker=yes/no to
> indicate if it has real time arrival data or not.  So, lit, shelter and
> bench are all good tags to have if the data is there.
>
> I have asked for more metadata but haven't gotten any as yet. The file on
the public server does not have as many attributes filled as the file they
provided me with (and which I since uploaded to
http://lima.schaaltreinen.nl/tmp/ - pick either the zip file or the four
shapefile parts)


> How accurate is the coordinate data for those stop nodes?  Is it good
> enough to indicate which corner the stop is at at an intersection, and
> which side of the corner?
>
>
Yes, it is.


>
> Do you know if the location ID is publicly visible or only for backend
> purposes?  In some places the stops have stop IDs that can be texted to 511
> to get arrival times for the next bus or two.  If these are public facing
> numbers I would throw them in a ref tag otherwise I would probably leave
> them out.
>

Yes, it's used in their real time vehicle location API and they also have
an automated voice system that you can key the number into to get schedules
for the stop.

>
>
>>
>> I was planning to just use what I know which is highway=bus_stop for the
>> bus stops, and railway=tram_stop for the light rail stops. But now I see
>> that using highway=bus_stop is *very controversial*[1]! If it weren't so
>> blatantly untrue I'd think it was a joke. Or did I miss something?
>>
>> To get back on topic, if anyone wants to help out devise a mapping from
>> UTA stops file to OSM, I'd welcome some help. I've never done a local
>> import before, and I'm not a particularly big fan of imports, so I want to
>> proceed with caution.
>>
>
> I use highway=bus_stop for all of my bus_stop tagging.  As far as I know
> thats also how the public transit add on in JOSM handles them.  The whole
> public_transport tag set feels like overkill to me.  I don't see how having
> the bus stop node where the bus stop is as opposed to the on way is that
> hard to handle.  Ideally the bus stops end up as part of route relations
> that make that explicit anyhow.
>

That was my thought too. There have been a few overwrought tagging
proposals lately, the public_transport one and the lanes one come to mind.
As long as they are backwards compatible with what normal mappers use I'm
fine with it though. I'm just going to go ahead and use highway=bus_stop.

-- 
martijn van exel
schaaltreinen.nl
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20120416/c6f831f0/attachment.html>