Dear fellow mappers,
Is anyone interested in updating these tools? I can provide lots of
input and testing, but my Java skills aren't where they need to be to
attempt this alone.
I'm the author of the public_transport plugin. I would be interested in
restarting development. It's not about Java skills, the problem is
missing consent about tagging or, more precise, the general modelling.
There had been a group that was very vocal for making a textbook example
of design by committee, and the result is now known as "approved public
transport scheme". They did not ask for input from experienced mappers
or developers. I decided to consider it a waste of time and stopped
developing.
I'm not the only one. Tagging never really got traction, and only a tiny
fraction of stops conforms to that approach. This is why we have now the
mess we have.
One example is the dissent on whether the bus stop should be a node on
the vehicle's way or a node where the passengers wait. You will find all
solutions implemented, because each local community decided different.
The "approved scheme" will allow any variant. It's even worse for where
to put the name: I got even within local communities incompatible
answers, all referring to the "approved scheme".
Another example are route relations. While there are wild constructions
called route_master and network which are basically collection
relations, the problem that bothers most people in practice has never
been tackled: We would like to see per way segment only one or very few
relations and need a construction to assemble itineraries from that.
That would greatly reduce maintenance. And: how to tell apart services
that run a few times per day from those that have a headway of a few
minutes?
Given that, it would help have an algorithm to answer the simple
questions for real world examples and their current tagging:
- Where to start/end routing of passengers?
- Where to start/end routing of vehicles?
- How to obtain a name of a station?
There are probably more interesting questions. But it will be already
hard enough to tell apart unusual tagging on purpose (because of a
special situation) from mistakes and the various variants of taggings
for these three, and adding complexity (like more questions) had killed
a lot of prospective efforts.
It's not enough if the solution works fine in your local area and
hopefully works somewhere else, more or less untested. We need an
algorithm to do the right thing in 95% or better 99% of all places
around the world.
Is this the right list to discuss mass edits to add the missing tags, or would
it be
local lists for each area, or somewhere else?
Note that the hard thing isn't to write a bot that processes a lot of
objects. The hard thing is tell what we actually want. The bot has to
answer the above mentioned questions to actually do more good than harm.
To make it clear: We need rules how to understand what we have right
now, changing at most 1% of all stops and stations or even less. Such a
change we inevitably need local knowledge, hence it is unlikely that a
bot will help. What we don't need is yet another standard.
Best regards,
Roland
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