In the UK streets are tagged with the value on the sign at the end of the street and this works very well with printed maps. When I lived in London a group of bus stops might be labeled A-E but in general bus stops do not have a name or id painted on the bus stop. Unfortunately UK practice is not followed by other parts of the world. In Ottawa each bus stop has a four digit number painted on it in General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) terms this is known as the stop_id. The GTFS stop_name value is not apparent to the mapper.
The GTFS file contains bus stop location information but this information can be up to 200 meters out. In Ottawa the convention is to name the stop after the nearest cross street. Add in town planning where through traffic is discouraged from travelling on residential roads but footpaths have been placed to give access to bus stops and you can have two or three different bus stops with the same stop_name value but different stop_id values. Does it matter what we call the stop? Well having the stop_id value available means that local mappers can at least map the bus stops to the correct location. Without the stop_id value it becomes more difficult. The current Ottawa GTFS stops.txt file is incomplete, some stops appear to be missing, mapping with the stop_id makes it easier to identify them. We now have applications that process the tags on an osm file. Maperitive for example will search tags to locate points of interest. shop=florist finds local florists. There are many GTFS aware applications that know the GTFS tag names so reusing them in OSM makes sense. Routing systems for example work better if the bus stop is in the right place and correctly labeled. With the NAPTAN import some one decided which NAPTAN field should be placed in the name tag and I suspect the original field in the NAPTAN database wasn't simply name. Locally my personal preference for the name tag would be to concatenate the GTFS stop_id and stop_name fields but also retain them as separate tags. That way some one could set up the rendering rules for bus stops to display either should they wish to do so. By the way even street name signs are not always simple. In OSM the rule is to use the name on the street sign at the time of mapping. Recently in Ottawa there has been a move to bilingual street signs so Leduc Crescent becomes "croissant Leduc Crescent". If you tag street name:"croissant Leduc Crescent" then you get into issues of what do you expect a casual user to enter on a find or search command adding in that some streets were mapped before the new street sign rules. Cheerio John On 4 July 2010 06:23, Jenny Campbell <[email protected]> wrote: > In the UK, following the NAPTAN import, all stops use name, not stop_name. > A name tag on a bus stop implies that the tag is referring to the name of > the stop anyway, no risk of mix ups there! We use name in the same way for > everything else on the map, why should a bus stop be different? > > Jeni > > > On 01/07/2010 17:08, john whelan wrote: > >> Since the JOSM plug_in will become the defacto standard since it will be >> used by many people who don't read posts here or understand the issues may I >> request that it uses the GTFS tag of stop_name and stop_code rather than the >> tag of name. >> >> > _______________________________________________ > Talk-transit mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit >
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