Hi Cj,

What you have got there is Southern Vectis’s link to a subset of the current 
NaPTAN data. Please note, though, that Southern Vectis are not responsible for 
this data - that is maintained by Isle of Wight Council.

NaPTAN data is always available by local authority, or for the entire country, 
from the official source. You don’t need to have a login, and instructions can 
be found at http://naptan.app.dft.gov.uk/DataRequest/help on how to download 
individual areas. Essentially, you will need the Atcoprefix to form the URL and 
you can get this most easily by following the “last submissions” link contained 
within that page.

But all this comes with a health warning!

NaPTAN data from the official source will generally be more up to date than 
what has been imported into OSM some years ago. But I know, from when I 
proposed a mechanical edits few years ago, that many mappers have surveyed 
their local stops and would be unhappy with it being updated without a further 
survey by what they regard as an inferior source, particularly if is not well 
maintained.

Be aware of “Custom and practice” stops in NaPTAN which are unmarked. Buses 
stop there, but there isn’t something that you can see on the ground that you 
can map, necessarily. Hail and Ride stops are even worse, because they are 
virtual stops intended to give something that a scheduling system can hang a 
time on rather than an accurate representation of where a bus stops. You can 
identify all of these by BusStopType in the data.

Common errors in the official NaPTAN data set may be missing stops, or the 
inclusion of stops that are no longer in use. Some areas remove stops when they 
are no longer served, even though the infrastructure is still in place on the 
ground (wrong, in my opinion, but there you go). You may also find stops that 
are not precisely where you expect them to be, and they may also not have the 
name that is on the stop flag on the ground.

That last one is a point worth dwelling on. NaPTAN is intended to be granular 
in its data. That means that the street that a stop is on should go into the 
“streetname” field, and a short name should go into the “commonname” field. Our 
advice to database administrators is that where there isn’t a prominent 
landmark (bus station, pub, etc) then this is most suited to a nearby side 
road. That way stops along a long road can have different names, which is 
essential in a journey planner or timetable. On the ground, though, many 
authorities will put composite names on the flags, and often the other way 
round if they consider the main road to be more important. And they then differ 
on occasion from what the operator wants to call the stop (although operators 
tend to focus on just the timetabled points). Oh, and some areas misuse the 
fields. In Sheffield (for good historic reasons, so I don’t want to pick on 
them unduly) you will find that the commonname is simply the stop letter e.g. 
CS1 which should properly be in the Indicator field, and the common name (which 
should be “Century Square”) is only found by looking at the stop area name.

All this just goes to highlight that you will need to reflect carefully on what 
the fields that you are updating in OSM should be before making the changes - 
although I agree that in many places the data in OSM is way out of date and 
desperately needs updating.

Regards,
Stuart Reynolds
for traveline south east and anglia

On 18 Jan 2020, at 11:18, Cj Malone via Talk-GB 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

Hello,

I've recently found an open data set with more accurate bus stop names
than OSM. Based on my limited survey of differences in OSM data and
this data, theirs has been more accurate. Not really surprising, since
it's there network, and most of the OSM data hasn't been updated since
the naptan import nearly a decade ago.

I intent to start updating OSM based on this data. The legal mailing
list has OK'ed this as it's OGLv3.

I won't be importing any nodes, but I do intend for it to be "machine
assisted". I will create a report similar to
https://gregrs.dev.openstreetmap.org/fhrs/ where I will then go through
on a node by node basis and decide if the node should be updated. Any
tag I edit I will add source:name=Southern Vectis, and leave the
naptan:CommonName untouched.

While I do this I could also upgrade from highway=bus_stop to
public_transport=platform, bus=yes. Keeping the legacy tags as the wiki
recommends.

I will be using this data set https://www.islandbuses.info/open-data
the same data set is available for more regions, but at the moment I don't 
intent to use them, a local mapper would be better suited. 
https://www.discoverpassenger.com/2019/06/25/open-data-portals-go-
ahead-group/

Any comments?

Thanks
Cj


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