I’m still having grief with bus routes again. I’m beginning to doubt whether it’s worth doing at all. Where I live, there are several related bus routes with lots of commonality but also lots of exceptions. They run over each other’s partial routes and self-cross all the time.

Doing one such bus route is bad enough, but trying to maintain a load of related ones is a nightmare.

I naively thought that I could take one route, copy/paste it as another relation and just change the different bits. Copy/paste doesn’t work really well in JOSM. I only seem to be able to reliably copy/paste to a “new” relation, which means that the relation-id of a route effectively keeps changing.

I’m now trying to download the XML, make changes manually and re-upload them. However, downloading a relation contains all sorts of other crap, such as “author”,”timestamp”,”revision”, which I can’t sensibly copy into a new relation.

Nobody really supports super-relations, so the only sane way is to keep dependent routes in sync manually. How do other people do this?