The place to start with experimental public-transport routing is Switzerland.
The Stundentakt timetable means that one can assume viable connections at most
interchanges at least on an hourly basis, so no detailed timetable is required
in OSM. In these cases one needs to know frequency (assume hourly) and some
idea of speed of travel on various services. In practice for post buses one can
assume that the journey takes under half-an-hour or under and hour (obviously
there are exceptions, but many of these services have pre-bookable seats, e.g.,
Postbus from Bellinzona to Thusis). SBB have all this, and walking interchange
times on their online timetable and planner: but back 7-8 years ago, their IT
department regarded this as their single most complex application. They have
none of the complexity of train timetabling and routing which now exist in the
UK, to say nothing of the additional complexity of the fare structure.
When OSM is able to generate this route by public transport, we might be in a
position to tackle doing it in the UK:
Zurich HBf to Davos Platz via Laax Bergbahnen. From memory it was 4 trains, 3
post buses and a Davos service bus, with every connection made in from 3-4
minutes.
Personally, I find ticket price has a far bigger impact on when I travel and by
which route, and the absence of bus services on Sundays means its the car or
not. However, a map of available routes (particularly bus), including all
operators, not stopping at local authority boundaries, and potentially
available somewhere other than the web..., would be very useful. That's why I'm
keen to put bus routes into OSM. So I support Peter's options A & B, but C
seems a step too far.
Jerry Clough
_______________________________________________
Talk-transit mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit
