For the Olympics, a lot of work was done on the main streets of my local area, Leytonstone (in east London) so I decided it was time to spruce up the map, too.

After using the Bing aerials to fix up a lot of the layout and one-way road systems, I recently decided the bus stops needed some detail and so I did a focussed survey of all the stops.

Notes in hand, I sat down to map the stops and realised there was a whole, complex set of tagging for Public Transport!

It all makes sense now, and I like the elegance of it, but figuring it all out from the information dotted around the wiki took a lot of reading. I ended up keeping a bunch of wiki pages open in tabs to flick around and reference : Public transport

Public transport proposed

Relation:route

highway=bus_stop and public_transport=stop_position

I started out capturing all the info from my notes onto a bus stop (platform) marker (usually existing from the NAPTAN import), including recording the routes displayed on the pole in the deprecated route_ref tag. (This makes life a lot easier later on when editing routes, as you don’t have to keep going back to your notes to see which routes stop where.)

Then I created an on-road stop_point marker for the stop. (I recommend adding a name= tag matching the stop as this also makes life easier when editing the route relations.)

Next step is to convert any existing type=site relation to type=public_transport, public_transport=stop_area, or create a new relation to associate the stop_point and the platform. Train yourself to select the on-road stop_point first, then the platform, as that is the order you want to use later when adding them to the route relations.

Now, time to exercise the memory: memorise the routes which that stop is associated with, then select the stop_point and the platform. Multi-select the routes in the relation list and right-click to add both the stop_point and the platform to all the routes simultaneously.

This is where I cursed the planners in Leytonstone! I realised that the one-way system would require two routes for every bus route which passes through here. :-(

Now, don’t forget to add the ways in the vicinity to the relevant routes aswell. Beware that you only select routes which match the direction of the stop you’re editing (my high street runs almost North/South, so the splits aren’t too hard to figure out.)

As I’m still trying to make sure I’m tagging correctly, I’ve started with one route : the W14 to Leyton Mills. I copied the existing route and modified the tags to the new standard. Then I sorted the ways in the relation editor and zoomed in to each gap, modifying the map and adding/removing ways until the route was a continuous line. Then the difficult part of sorting the stop_point/platform combos into the correct routing order.

I found the JOSM ‘Public Transport’ plugin was more of a hindrance than a help here: Sorting the itinerary adds unnecessary forward/backward roles to every way (which have to be manually deleted) and Sorting the Stops didn’t seem to produce the correct order. I think for the next route I do, I’ll add all the ways first, delete all the stops and platforms and scroll along the route adding them back in the correct order.

So that’s what I did on OpenStreetMap these last few days.