On 2016-10-31 17:59, Greg Troxel wrote:
Stephen Sprunk <[email protected]> writes:
I should point out that "bus lines", "cruise lines", "air lines",
etc. are plural when talking about one company (e.g. American
Airlines) because they operate a collection of individual lines
between specific locations, such as New York-Los Angeles.
But one would say 'Holland America is a cruise line".
In formal writing, I'd probably correct that to "Holland America is a
cruise line operator", but I'm not pedantic enough to do that in
informal writing, much less speech.
So it's messy.
True, but English is a messy language; things have a habit of morphing
into forms that are de jure incorrect, yet so many people repeat them
that they become de facto correct over time. We joke about how some
non-natives speak English "better" than us, yet correctness just doesn't
"sound right"; one of the hardest things to learn is speaking
incorrectly like we natives do!
For instance, "than us" above should really be "than we [do]", but if
you actually say "than we" without the "do", native speakers will
probably think you're pretentious--or a non-native speaker.
I'm still not 100% following. In the wiki table, is concept number 1
just a name for the collection of route variants, and basically the
name that the bus company (agency/whatever) uses? I would call that
"bus_route_name" then, with a name, and perhaps bus_route_ref for
just the numberish part, along with bus_route_operator. This is
making it like highway ref tags.
Incidentally, this drives me nuts about transit. If the agencies
actually published the names that way (e.g. variants 42A and 42B,
perhaps with the shared portions just labeled 42), it'd make their
services a lot easier to use; today, it's very easy to accidentally
get on a "42 to Foo Street" when you actually needed a "42 to Bar
Avenue". When "via"s get involved, it's even worse. Who came up with
this nonsense and thought it was a good idea?
I agree, and the for the most part the agency near me (MBTA,
www.mbta.com) is good about this, having two route numbers for the two
ways the bus can run. But then they publish a "74/75" schedule that
shows information about 74 and 75 since they are mostly the same and
departures are interleaved. I don't think there's any way to totally
win here.
That makes sense since they're obviously related, at least if the shared
segment is significant, yet it recognizes a clear difference between the
two services outside the shared segment. Seems like a win to me.
Note that I'm comparing that to using a single line label, which makes a
schedule like this much harder to understand that it should be:
http://dart.org/schedules/w019no.htm
http://dart.org/schedules/w019so.htm
It's one thing for some trips (particularly the first and last few of
the service day) to not run the entire length of a line, but when you
branch at one or both ends, i.e. serving mutually exclusive subsets of
stops, calling it a single line seems rather questionable.
S
--
Stephen Sprunk "Those people who think they know everything
CCIE #3723 are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
K5SSS --Isaac Asimov
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