OpenStreetMap

Bus Routes and variants

Posted by mwbg on 25 May 2013 in English.

Thank you, xeen, for the information on using relations for bus routes. I just wish that all this stuff was in one place.

It appears that I have to do each variant of a bus route as a separate relation. This seems very cumbersome: one of the routes here has six different opt-outs (same spine of route, but serves different roads/villages/estates at different times of the day) and all of them are possible. Each trip seems to be different; am I really expected to create 64 separate relations (albeit grouped together under route_master) ?

Am I supposed to create a separate relation for a route whose “opposite direction” is a simple reversal of the “forward direction” ? What if the “reverse” route differs only by the path it takes round a roundabout ?

Discussion

Comment from goldfndr on 27 May 2013 at 16:58

Is the timetable for that route with 6 (er, 2^6) alternatives published online somewhere? Surely they’re using only a dozen or so, not all 64 possibilities! But, if they are, I’m guessing you might find super-relations the way to go.

A-B-C-D-E
   | |
    F

Above, the 2 alternative routes are ABCDE and ABFDE. Alternative ABCDE can also be represented as AB+BCD+DE, and alternative ABFDE as AB+BFD+DE. AB is a relation, BCD is a relation, BFD is a relation, DE is a relation, ABCDE is a super-relation with members AB, BCD, DE, ABFDE is a super-relation with members AB, BFD, DE.

Something I can’t determine from the Open Transport guidance is whether one must have ABCDE and ABFDE as members vs AB, BCD, BFD, DE. Looking at http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-transit/2013-March/001636.html I suspect one would put in the whole route (A to E).

Comment from mwbg on 30 May 2013 at 14:53

The route in question is FMR’s 44 route. Looking at the timetable, there seem to be several short runnings, extensions, loops, opt-outs, runnings-under-different-number. Yes, super-relations seem to be the way to go. However, none of the analysers seem to support them yet.

Oh dear. I wish all this stuff in OSM were defined properly, without a chaotic mess of proposals, committees, ideas, wikis. I don’t want to direct policy on OSM; I just want to follow rules and map my area.

FMR are fiddling again. This time, they’ve invented a new route called “43F”. (Who ever heard of a bus suffix “F”?).

I’ve added a tentative role “school_loop” until someone can tell me how to do it properly. I’m not even sure that the loop is correct: the timetable is not very forthcoming.

This new route also has a one-off extension (not a loop) to serve a (different) school. Should I just make this part of the route, and just accept that the normal daytime route is a short-running of that? Seems a bit silly.

It also has a “request loop”; on request, it deviates from the main road to serve an industrial estate (SDO). Naturally, it doesn’t pick-up there. Should I show this loop separately, or just consider the loop as part of the “main” route ? Serving the request loop doesn’t omit any stops on the real “main” route.

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