So, I went to visit a friend in Westport, Ireland for a few days, stopping in Dublin on the way. I tracked all the bus routes and painstakingly added them to OSM during my stay and when I got home. There were five bus routes in total:

• bus 760 from Dublin Airport to Galway
• bus 456 from Galway to Westport
• bus 450 from Westport to Murrisk and back
• bus 450 from Westport to Dooagh on Achill Island and back
• bus 440 from Westport to Athlone
• bus 73 from Athlone to Kilkenny

I used the tracking function in OSMAnd for it. I tried to get as many of the bus stops as well, but when the bus did not stop, I had to make educated guesses as to where the bus stop was, because they were often not signposted. There were cases where it was called something Cross, so I put the node at the only crossroads we passed. Also, the digital announcement in the bus changed shortly after, so I knew we had passed it. It’s not a perfect system, but I could not make the bus driver stop at every stop just for the sake of the survey. Sometimes I just didn’t map the stops at all, because I didn’t want to add wrong data.

One encounter I had on the way to Dooagh was meeting a group of European students going the same directions who were confused as to which bus stop was the right one, because GoogleMaps had sent them to the other one. Well… I tried to bring up OSM, but the Swedish guy I talked to wasn’t interested. His loss.

I had checked the 73 before, and it seemed already mapped, but my route diverged from the already mapped one. It might be that the route was changed in the last couple of years. This is one of the reasons why I decided to add survey:date to all the bus routes I had ever mapped and where I could still find the GPS trace. I think this would generally be a good idea to figure out how old the data is.

I also left track points for the reference numbers of minor roads, wherever they seemed to be missing or wrong. I don’t know how many those were, but my guess would be 30-40.

In Murrisk and Dooagh, I went on unmapped hikes which I also mapped. I went a step further and uploaded some of the photographs (of trail markers and other landmarks and interesting things along the hike) to Wikimedia and created categories for the Murrisk Loop and the Dooagh Trail. I could use those photographs of trail markers on OSM then.

The screenshots here are taken from hiking.waymarkedtrails.org:

(Dooagh Trail - tracked - and Deserted Village trail - estimated route, because there is only one way up)

(Murrisk Loop - purple arrows - and estimated route for Murrisk Pier Loop - blue arrow)

I only wished I had had more time to map more. Obviously, I added a few house numbers, businesses, benchmarks and bicycle parking etc in Westport as well.