Giacomo Servadei continued to work on the PT_Assistant plugin for JOSM

Hiking, bicycle and equestrian routes

The plugin is not just about public transport anymore, it can also highlight hiking and bicycle routes and report problems with their continuity. It now also visualizes forward/backward roles, which makes editing them a lot more convenient.

One of the problems I noticed over the past year, was that while fixing public transport route relations, sometimes foot and bicycle routes were broken and the validator didn’t warn about this. The other problem is that when bicycle routes fork, forward and backward roles are needed, but they depend on the direction of the way and those little arrows are very hard to see.

Now one leg is coloured in blue, the other in red, which makes it immediately obvious whether the route is mapped correctly and it’s easier to know if forward needs to become backward or vice versa.

Public transport improvements

## Tools

• The plugin can now sort stops according to the sequence of the ways in the route relations.

• It can help with splitting roundabouts, while keeping the route relations that pass over them correct

• There is a new map mode to add stop_position nodes. If such nodes are added to the first or last ways of the itinerary, the way is split and only the pertinent part is kept.

• And there is a new map mode to help with ways selection. It will select all ways in between 2 forks, which are suitable for the mode of transport worked on. At the moment this defaults to bus.

Validation

There are also some new categories of problems the plugin reports and proposes fixes for.

• gaps of a single (suitable) way + automatic fix

• a bug with the detection of relations that could be fixed by simply sorting the ways was fixed.

• a new category will tell the mapper about relations that end up with less gaps when the ways are sorted. This can help detect routes tagged with public_transport:version=2, which aren’t composed of a simple sorted sequence of ways for each variation, but instead still have ways for both/all directions of travel in them.

• There is a new category for routes that don’t start or end neatly on a stop_position node near to a corresponding platform node.

• The names of the first and last stops are compared to from and to tags in the route relations.

• A warning is given if the first or last way don’t correspond to the first or last stop in the route relation.