On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 5:08 PM Jo <winfi...@gmail.com> wrote: > (started writing this several hours ago) > > And another that goes into full detail, listing all the departures at the > first stop and then lists all stops, with the most common times between > stops as roles. For this we would need separate public_transport=timetable > relations. > > I've been trying how that could work and I can confirm what everybody > already knew: it's a lot of work, even for lines that seem relatively > simple at first sight! :-) An incredible time sink. >
And it can go stale, very quickly. Sure, there are places where the same route has operated to the same schedule since time immemorial, but there are other places where timetables change on whim. And it's re-inventing the wheel. GTFS already exists. Could we do better? Maybe, maybe not. Could we convince operators to duplicate their effort in maintaining GTFS and our alternative? I very much doubt it. Could we convince data consumers to support our format as well as GTFS? I very much doubt that too. This is not just re-inventing the wheel, it's insisting everyone has to fit our wheel as well as the wheel they already have. Good luck with that. What we can do is come up with a tag to place on a route that points at a GTFS feed on the web. That feed could be published by the operator or by an independent organization. We could perhaps encourage mappers to generate feeds where the operator doesn't provide them and maybe even go so far as to run a web server hosting those feeds until such time as a more official feed is available. Even offer an alternative feed that our tag points to when the official feed is known to be seriously incorrect. I think we could (probably should) have a tag linking to the operator's timetable whether or not a GTFS feed is available. Even the query tool of the standard map exposes links that can be clicked on. That doesn't require a third-party app to make the info available to an ordinary user. So, an interesting exercise. One that (perhaps) had to be tried to determine if it was a good idea or not. And maybe there's room for a sloppy "once a day" or "once a week" tag on minor routes that will probably never get a GTFS feed. -- Paul
_______________________________________________ Talk-transit mailing list Talk-transit@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit
