[OSM-talk] Bus Stops

[Ben Laenen]

On Thursday 24 April 2008, Andy Robinson (blackadder) wrote:
> 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.

I'd like to compare tagging bus stops with tram stops here. While I 
think it's common (at least from what I've seen) to use nodes on the 
ways representing the tram lines, -- like we do for train stations -- 
for some reason it isn't for bus stops. Even though tram stops have the 
exact same issue: it's not always a stop in both direction


> 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. 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.

That can be done for bus stops with only one line, but not when there 
are ten bus lines stopping which go to ten different destinations.

In a beautiful world we could just add the bus stops to the bus route 
relations, but we'd need to define good roles to make it obvious what 
direction a bus goes to there. But if that is worked out, there'll be 
no ambiguity left to put bus stop nodes on the highways anymore.

Greetings
Ben