As I mentioned in an earlier post, we have two public transit systems operating in the area of our university. They both serve a transit center/bus_station just off campus, but they share some stops on campus (and pass by some of the others' stops on campus). They have multiple routes at some of the shared stops.
I have found guidance on the wiki (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dbus_stop) that where a multiple routes serve a stop, this should be tagged by listing the routes in numeric order and then (if necessary) alphabetical order, with the routes separated by semicolons, using no spaces unless they are part of the route designation. The example in the wiki is route_ref=66A;123;456;s78;x9 What is not clear is how to handle a situation in which a stop serves two operators and multiple routes for each. For example, one stop is on HART routes 5 and 12, and on USF routes A and C By inference, we would code the operators in alphabetical order, separated by semicolons, as operator=HART;USF And in this case, because the USF system designates routes by letters while HART uses numbers, we could luck out with route_ref=5;12;A;D But if both systems used route numbers, this would not indicate which routes belong to which operators. I know from experience that transit agencies in the Puget Sound region interline all the time, sometimes at transit centers/bus_stations but more often not, and most use numeric route identifiers. My understanding is that when the UK privatized some of its bus service, it had multiple companies serving the same stops. So this should not be a one-off instance here. An alternative format would be to code an operator1=HART and route_ref1=5;12, and an operator2=USF with route_ref2=A;D, but this seems error-prone to me. I've seen this format used in mapping some other features, but I haven't seen documentation of it. A recent comment here suggested that it might be better not to include route information, because routes change, and situations such as this may be another reason not to do so. However, the routes near campus are very stable (the USF system adds routes, but otherwise changes them only to avoid construction). And, when we communicated with local mappers of bus_stops about our plans to upload GTFS data, we were asked whether we could upload the routes as well as the other information. So there is demand for it, even though in a trip-planning application we would use the GTFS stop_id to link between other OSM data and transit route/schedule data. We would welcome suggestions or guidance on how to handle the route tagging. Given the specialized focus of this problem, I'm not posting it to the tagging listserv. Ed Edward L. Hillsman, Ph.D. Senior Research Associate Center for Urban Transportation Research University of South Florida 4202 Fowler Ave., CUT100 Tampa, FL 33620-5375 813-974-2977 (tel) 813-974-5168 (fax) hills...@cutr.usf.edu http://www.cutr.usf.edu<blocked::http://www.cutr.usf.edu/>
_______________________________________________ Talk-transit mailing list Talk-transit@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit
