On 1 Jun 2009, at 08:41, Roger Slevin wrote:
Google take a feed of NaPTAN stop point data – and hence something
like Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester is a mass of them.
NaPTAN does have the facility to hold stoparea data – but the data
is not fully populated (as it is not useful when presenting journey
itineraries to the public – or local information systems have their
own way of creating such stopareas on the fly without requiring the
data to be held explicitly in NaPTAN records).
We did experiment with using stopareas with Google – but the need to
link the data to Google Transit for specific journey planning meant
that you were told to catch a bus at, say, Piccadilly Gardens –
rather than from stop 10 at Piccadilly Gardens ... and for
itineraries to be useful, the “stop 10” bit is quite important!
Interesting. Fyi, I have up-loaded images from a couple of places in
the UK where Stop Areas/Stop Places are used. Notice that in some
places there are nested stop places. For our purposes we can consider
Stop Place and Stop Area to be referring to the same thing, however
the correct technical term in CEN for the stuff on the ground is a
Stop Place.
London
http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterito/3584182693/
Leeds
http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterito/3584989420/
There are times when the hierarchy is useful - for example one might
first ask to go from Manchester to London, and then be offered routes
from Manchester Piccadilly or Manchester Oxford Road to London
Victoria Coach Station or London Euston, and then finally when one has
chosen the actual journey one might be told to use Platform 10 from
Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station. Similarly for large bus/coach
interchanges. For some bus/coach/rail interchanges one doesn't
actually know which Access will be used until shortly before the
vehicle departs so one can only give the station itself as the
starting point.
I do think that if we should accommodate this richer information where
it is available and where people want to built it and then people will
start using it for creative things, such as reducing the clutter on
zoomed out maps (Google just ignores bus stops as one zooms out to
stop it getting unmanageable, something which would not be ok for a
bus-centric map).
We could also consider using tools to automatically build stop places
and associate Accesses with Stopping Places to stop it being too
complicated for mappers.
Regards,
Peter
Roger
From: talk-transit-boun...@openstreetmap.org [mailto:talk-transit-boun...@openstreetmap.org
] On Behalf Of Frankie Roberto
Sent: 01 June 2009 08:34
To: talk-transit@openstreetmap.org
Subject: Re: [Talk-transit] Public transport workshop in Germany
On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 8:05 AM, Peter Miller <peter.mil...@itoworld.com
> wrote:
> The current situation with bus stops is more messy. (Just see
> Birmigham which seems to entirely consist of bus stops.) While
> stop places in the new schema allow to clean this up a bit, again,
> the renderer only has the choice to either paint two many
> symbols (all access points or all stopping points) or badly
> guess where to put the single point.
Which rendering view are you using? for the main Mapnik view on
openstreetmap there are no bus stops until one zooms in to zoom 17 at
which point there are certainly lots of bus stops (accesses).
It's good to see that we're not the only ones with this problem,
though. Google Maps seems to render a huge number of bus stops now
that they've imported public transit data for the uk. See http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=manchester,+uk&sll=37.579413,-95.712891&sspn=30.958234,75.234375&ie=UTF8&ll=53.479797,-2.239387&spn=0.005708,0.018368&z=16
for instance.
That view contains two bus stations (by Piccadilly Gardens and the
coach station by Chorlton Street), and yet both a rendered simply as
a mass of access points, rather than a singular named node (which
would be more useful).
So if we can solve this problem, we'll be one up on Google! :-)
Frankie
P.S It's good to see that platforms are now rendering on Mapnik (see http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.477811&lon=-2.243247&zoom=18&layers=B000FTF)
, however I note that it's not coping well with platforms that are
areas (as closed ways with area=yes). Having blue arrows on the
tramlines that are marked with oneway=yes is also a little odd.
--
Frankie Roberto
Experience Designer, Rattle
0114 2706977
http://www.rattlecentral.com
Sent from Manchester, Greater Manchester, United Kingdom
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