> Can I suggest we define some terms. > > A Line is all the journeys made using a particular reference (4, X13, > Citi1 etc). [...] > A Line Variant (also know as a Service Variant) is a unique stopping > pattern for a bunch of Journeys within a Line. (ie inbound, outbound, > inbound via the school, outbound but stopping at the station and not > going to the end of the route etc). [...] > I strongly suggest we don't add this data to > OSM - it is too complex and not needed for mapping and should be kept > in the schedules service.
I strongly refuse that point of view. From the preceding discussion, I conclude that the paradigm of bus services varies very much between different countries. I don't know the situation in Great Britain, so I'm referring to the situation in Germany (in particular: Düsseldorf, Münster, Wuppertal), Switzerland, The Netherlands, Belgium and maybe other countries. In these places, most bus services have very few variants (in general two, one forth and one back) and timetables are very stable. For example, in Wuppertal more than 90 percent of all services have not changed even their timetable in the last 15 years. Thus, the timetable information has a similar complexity than the information about lines. The paradigm can be found under the name "Integraler Taktfahrplan" in German or "Horaire cadencé" in French. I have not found an English translation. Roughly, it would be "Integrated fixed-interval timetables". On the other hand, there is no free timetable service in Germany or France. Thus, having the essential information (Where exist direct services? Which connections a designated and thus reliable for changing trains?) in OSM would be a great help. So I would suggest to encourage mappers to add timetable information whenever an integrated fixed-interval timetables exists. This might not apply to Great Britain, but I think we shouldn't take this as a reason to map Public Transport elsewhere worse than possible. Cheers, Roland _______________________________________________ Talk-transit mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit
