[OSM-talk] Bus stops (ready for London Mapping Party)

[Robert (Jamie) Munro]

It struck me that it should be fairly easy if we are walking around
London to spot Bus Stops and take photos of the lists of busses that
serve them. If we load those photos into JOSM, it will be easy to tag
enough detail to create a useful bus map.

The question is, what tags should we use?

There was a thread about 3 months ago here:
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2006-October/007803.html
but it didn't get very far, it just listed some problems that might be
encountered.

Currently, on map_features, it says you should add highway=bus_stop to
the node. This doesn't support adding bus route numbers (or names), nor
does it support saying that a bus stop is on only one side of the road.

I propose:

* add another tag on bus stops called bus_routes that has a semicolon
separated list of bus numbers (or names for routes without a generally
known number like the Oxford Tube).

* If there are two bus stops opposite (or close to opposite), serving
the same busses, they can just go as one node at the average point of
the two stops.

* If the bus stop is only for busses in one direction, it should have a
direction=(N|S|E|W), pointing in the (rough) direction that the busses
travel. (not strictly necessary on one way streets, but still useful)

* If there are multiple bus stops serving different routes, one after
the other (as in busy town centres), they can go in as one stop that
just serves all the routes.

A problem that we may have with features like bus stops is that they are
 also nodes within a way, and if an editing user is not being careful,
they may be tempted to move them along the way to make a better curve
elsewhere on the road. Can we add features to JOSM and the applet that
warn you if you try to move a node in a way that has tags of it's own
(other than created_by)?

Also, should we add something to routes that branch (e.g. _a, _b etc.)
for the different branches so that we can tell which way each bus will go?

I'm not sure where I should list the above on the proposed features
section of the wiki, so I've made a new page:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Busses
to collect this idea and any others about representing bus transport.

Robert (Jamie) Munro

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