[OSM-talk] Bus Stops

[Dave Stubbs]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 9:28 AM, Andy Robinson (blackadder)
<blackadderajr at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Jeffrey Martin wrote:
>  >Sent: 24 April 2008 9:06 AM
>
> >To: Peter Miller
>  >Cc: talk at openstreetmap.org
>
> >Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Bus Stops
>  >
>
> >Some people advocate nodes off to the side of the way
>  >to represent the location of the pole or shelter in relation
>  >to the road.
>  >
>  >Near where I live (Korea) there is often a shelter on
>  >one side of the road for buses going both directions.
>  >In that case I'm guessing I would put a shelter node
>  >on one side of the road and a node that is not a shelter
>  >on the other side.
>  >
>  >How do I relate these nodes to the way? I don't
>  >like the idea of short segments perpendicular to
>  >the way.
>
>  Because a bus stop is a highway feature it really in my view should be part
>  of it. And because we map what we see on the ground then logically if there
>  are two bus stops not quite opposite each other then I place two nodes, one
>  for each and tag them appropriately. Placing short links from a bus stop
>  node placed off the highway to the highway itself is I guess fine if those
>  links are tagged as highway=footway, but personally I think that's a lot of
>  unnecessary effort and complexity in the map.

Where as I think of bus stops as a pavement feature -- I really don't
care which road it's on, that's the bus driver's problem ;-)
I get the feeling we should be tagging both (if you can be bothered)
and linking the two -- but I'd prefer this didn't happen with short
footways... they come across to me as a bit fake. It's a virtual link,
so just keep it virtual: bus_stops=here or something. Alternatively
get out the relation box of tricks, but that might be unnecessarily
complicated.
It's certainly the better option than hacking someone's nice bus stops
into your own preferred style, even if you aren't going to do it that
way for new mapping.

>
>  The remaining issue revolves around the direction of the bus at a particular
>  node. I didn't have an answer to this until I looked at what the signage was
>  on my local bust stops. Now I find it easy to tag because each one tells me
>  in which direction the bus is travelling (eg "towards Birmingham"). So I add
>  a towards= tag and jobs a good un.

This works! I generally find I need the help of a timetable to figure
out if I'm at the right stop as it's quite normal for the bus to be
heading in the wrong direction for the place stated if it's trying to
catch another stop on the way, but given the whole route information
you should be able to figure it out.

> I'm not going to worry at the moment
> about how I might use this tag to make bus route information, the important
> aspect is that the data that's needed to work that out later is in the
> database


And lets face it, the moment someone actually starts using this data
we'll probably decide to do something completely different anyway :-)

Dave