Currently, mapping public transport routes is extremely tedious. Firstly, you have to select all the ways in order, and add them to the relation. This is usually not that difficult, however if it is a long distance route then downloading data becomes a problem. (The best solution to this I can find is using the continuous download plugin and suppressing dialogues).
In my area, ways are already mapped in PTV1, so all I have to do is download the relation and reselect all the ways so that they are in order again. Afterwards, you have to add stops one by one. This is the tedious part. In the UK, we have access to the website https://bustimes.org , which gives bus timetables and stops that a route takes. (It is all open data). This makes finding and adding stops to a route relation relatively easy. However, even with this website, adding stops to a relation is very, very slow. The last tedious step is adding "opening_hours" and "interval:conditional" tags. (Note that the wiki is unclear about using these tags for pt routes, so I am going to ask about this in the tagging mailing list.) All of this is very difficult and more importantly, slow. So naturally I searched for methods of speeding this up. Of course, the only way to map pt relations at a decent speed is in JOSM (you can use id, but it is far too slow). Looking at the list of plugins, I found two plugins: 1. "pt_assistant" 2. "public transport" "pt_assistant" is simply a validator. "public transport", however, seemed to do exactly what I wanted. The documentation on the wiki page was long and sort of difficult to understand, however eventually I got the hang of it. It gives options to create bus routes from GPX tracks you have recorded, as well as sort routes and "suggest stops". Taking an entire bus journey to map it in OSM is impractical (often impossible for long distance routes). However, the other two options seem incredibly useful. I tried sorting routes - however it didn't seem to work: it would break them up and completely mess up the order. However, the final feature, "suggest stops", turned out to be a godsend - when it worked. You have to indicate which side of the road the stops will be on, and it would suggest stops on that side of the road (within reasonable distance). Sadly, the catch with this addon is that it is written in an outdated public transport scheme (the "oxomoa scheme"), meaning that it uses "forward" and "back" roles to determine which side of the road to check. When these roles aren't present, it simply checks using the direction of the way, in other words often it gives stops on the wrong side of the road. The JOSM relation editor, however, can tell whether a way is "forward" or "backward" without needing those roles explicitly mentioned by looking at the previous and next way. A similar problem occurs with the "sort ways" function: it adds "forward" and "backward" roles (as well as ruining the order). Furthermore, this plugin is closed-source (as far as I know), so it cannot be "fixed". So, my request to any JOSM developer who is interested: Can this addon be rewritten as an open-source addon that supports PTV2 and actually works? This would mean you could immediately add all the stops in the click of a button, and sort broken relations in a click of a button. I don't know how difficult this is, it could be that this is very difficult and no-one has the time to fix this, which would really be unfortunate. Thanks for your consideration, IpswichMapper
