For the Olympics, a lot of work was done on the main streets of my local area, Leytonstone (in east London) so I decided it was time to spruce up the map, too.

After using the Bing aerials to fix up a lot of the layout and one-way road systems, I recently decided the bus stops needed some detail and so I did a focussed survey of all the stops.

Notes in hand, I sat down to map the stops and realised there was a whole, complex set of tagging for Public Transport!

It all makes sense now, and I like the elegance of it, but figuring it all out from the information dotted around the wiki took a lot of reading. I ended up keeping a bunch of wiki pages open in tabs to flick around and reference : Public transport

Public transport proposed

Relation:route

highway=bus_stop and public_transport=stop_position

I started out capturing all the info from my notes onto a bus stop (platform) marker (usually existing from the NAPTAN import), including recording the routes displayed on the pole in the deprecated route_ref tag. (This makes life a lot easier later on when editing routes, as you don’t have to keep going back to your notes to see which routes stop where.)

Then I created an on-road stop_point marker for the stop. (I recommend adding a name= tag matching the stop as this also makes life easier when editing the route relations.)

Next step is to convert any existing type=site relation to type=public_transport, public_transport=stop_area, or create a new relation to associate the stop_point and the platform. Train yourself to select the on-road stop_point first, then the platform, as that is the order you want to use later when adding them to the route relations.

Now, time to exercise the memory: memorise the routes which that stop is associated with, then select the stop_point and the platform. Multi-select the routes in the relation list and right-click to add both the stop_point and the platform to all the routes simultaneously.

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