I had earlier written some PT schema thoughts on my wiki page. I’ve since had some more ideas, which I figured I’d try sharing via diary and see how they are received.

Non-breaking extensions to PTv2

Classed by use cases. (I’ve probably missed some. Please do point them out.)

1. Simple routes

The Stereo system - stops + optional via-points to disambiguate route. No route segments - consumers should generate that themselves.

This makes it significantly easier to create and maintain bus routes, to say nothing of train routes. It also removes some cases of relation-breakage. OsmAnd already supports such relations, although it doesn’t display the route itself in route visualization, only the stops.

(I don’t know of anything else that supports this. Indeed, PT Assistant in JOSM complains about “stop not served” for such relations. If you know of anything that does, please share it.)

2. Stations + varying platforms (trains, buses)

Same as #1 but use stations instead of platforms.

3. Stations + fixed platforms

Same as #1 but maybe platforms should be part of a stop area relation (depicting the station? But isn’t a stop area distinct from a station?), so routers know which station a platform belongs to.

Alternatively, platforms should have the same name=* as the station. (Tag duplication alert)

4. hail_and_ride, ferry routes

Use PTv2. Stop positions to mark start and end of route, ways to show route.

Breaking-change ideas for PTv2

1. Multiple values for public_transport=* - introduces duck tagging goodness to PT, doesn’t abuse tag semantics (like e.g. highway=bus_stop or railway=station do), and supports multi-modal stops.
   • platform values - bus_stop, minibus_stop, share_taxi_stop, train_platform, metro_platform [1], etc
   • station values - bus_station, metro_station, railway_station, etc

… See full entry

Vasant Vihar

• Target - 1,310
• Progress - 100
• Remaining - 1,210

Freedom Fighter Enclave

• Target - 665
• Progress - 239
• Remaining - 426

… See full entry

This post was mostly motivated by the urge to note down some address mapping stats.

Vasant Vihar

• Target [^1] - 1,296
• Progress [^2] - 72
• Remaining [^3] - 1,224

[^1] (building=* or landuse=*) in "Vasant Vihar" and type:way

[^2] (building=* or landuse=*) and "addr:housenumber"=* and type:way

[^3] (building=* or landuse=*) and -"addr:housenumber"=* and type:way

Freedom Fighter Enclave

• Target - 618
• Progress - 145
• Remaining - 473

… See full entry

Stood about fifteen minutes on the roadside yesterday, trying to decide what to map. On one hand, it was my weekly bus survey day, and on the other, I wanted to see for myself whether the reportedly-newly-opened Pink Line of the Delhi Metro really was extended till Lajpat Nagar or not. Well - Bus Day won over, so I took a 448 to Punjabi Bagh. On the way, on a bridge, I saw a train arrive at a platform on the Pink Line. Fancy-ass new coaches, and the sign declaring “Lajpat Nagar”. Killed two birds with one stone 🙂 [1]

Upon reaching Punjabi Bagh, I saw that a road there was called ‘Shiv Das Puri Road’ on a sign, and ‘Patel Road’ on the map. Figured I had best confirm the name with the locals, in case an alt_name or old_name was required. There was a tobacconist and a food stall there, but going up to them and asking, ‘Say, what’s this road called?’ would sound a little silly, given that there was a perfectly serviceable sign with the name there.

Solution - “Say, can you tell me where’s Patel Road?” Nobody had a clue 😄

I’d not even mapped all the stops at the place when it started raining. Why does it always have to start raining when I’m out surveying a bus route? 🤔 And this time, rain of the sort where it’s largely immaterial whether or not you have an umbrella - I merely walked, umbrella in hand, from a bus stop I was mapping to the one where I’d get the other 448, a distance no greater than 500m, and by that time the only part of me that wasn’t drenched was my bag with the precious phone in it.

… See full entry

I haven’t written a diary entry in a while, so this one’s like a mash-up of multiple entries 😉 Bear with me.

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A week or two ago, I set out to survey a bus route that has long intrigued me - the “Outer Mudrika Service” aka “बाहरी मुद्रिका सेवा”, or “OMS” for short. Like all “Mudrika” buses, it takes a circular route - but in this case, a big circle of Delhi. As of the 6th of August, I had mapped it as serving 84 stops - the average bus route serves at most 40, and this was not even it’s final form…I mean, I’d only mapped around half of it 😛

The survey turned out to be more grueling than I had anticipated. OMS starts and ends at Uttam Nagar, so I headed there (also by OMS, adding stops along the way I had missed in the night the last time). At Uttam Nagar Terminal, though, hardly anyone seemed to know exactly where to board it. I stood around an hour, not daring to sit lest I miss it when it comes (the fact that it’s a somewhat low-frequency route didn’t help). Figured I’d eat my packed lunch, but the place had an abundance of flies. Twice I walked between the terminal and the first bus stop where I suspected I’d actually find it, almost a kilometer away.

On the second time, at around 16:00 hours, I actually succeeded in boarding one. Wasn’t ideal - it would terminate halfway through, at Anand Vihar. Better than nothing, I figured.

Turns out, it was a blessing in disguise. Not only was even half of its route fairly long (particularly when you’re hungry and tired from standing so long! [1]), some manner of procession near Burari brought it to a halt at the apex of a flyover for some fifteen minutes. Atleast I got to eat 😛 By the end of it, my phone was running low on juice and I myself was thirsty and out of water. Called it a day at Anand Vihar and took a Metro back home.

… See full entry

I began documenting Delhi’s mapping of bus routes on the wiki, so that others can join the effort.

Bus 427 became the first route to be completely surveyed by traveling. 764 became the second.

A new workflow evolved -

1. First, I learned about creating local notes in OsmAnd
2. Then came the knowledge of OsmAnd’s ability to export them to a GPX file. This lets me open my OsmAnd notes in JOSM.
3. Then came JOSM’s “Convert to data layer” (right-click on a GPX layer -> Convert to data layer). [1] This makes a data layer with one node for each note. The text is in a note= tag.
4. And today I got the idea to convert the note= tags to name= tags (select all the ‘note’ nodes with Ctrl-A, double-click on the note= tag, and change the key from ‘note’ to ‘name’) to be able to see all the note text while editing. Sweet!

Editing this way in JOSM also allows me to see the notes sorted alphabetically. Double-click the note/name field, click the arrow for the drop-down menu, and tada! I haven’t yet put it to this use, but I’m excited at the prospect of it letting me concentrate my edits to a single route when working with bus sightings.

[1] Ooooh. As I wrote this, I discovered that you can also “Download from OSM along this track” and “Precache imagery tiles along this track”. Faaaaaancy!

In the last few days -

I discovered that with this month’s [1] update of OsmAnd’s PT data, all my work on bus route relations was finally visible in the app. Suddenly, so many bus stops on the map of Delhi (in OsmAnd) now show bus routes - it is a wonderful feeling! :D It also means that I can now begin using OsmAnd to aid my own commuting.

I took my first two bus trips exclusively for the purpose of mapping them. (I recorded a GPS trace, and tried to add as many bus stops on the way using OsmAnd as I could. If I could spot benches or tactile paving, I’d tag that, too; if I saw another bus, I’d add a local OsmAnd note for it.) [2]

This also led to what is perhaps the first bus route relation in Delhi approaching completion - Bus 680 is (as far as I know) the first route relation in Delhi to have both the first and the last stop_position added. It still has some stops to be added, and some sections need to be surveyed, to be on the safe side.

Lastly, my faithful Moto G 5s Plus, which I had hoped to keep for at least ten years, was stolen - ironically as I was boarding a bus, guitar in hand. Most of my data was synced to my laptops via Syncthing and NextCloud…but not the ~500 local OsmAnd notes in it - of which ~300 were bus sightings. Oh well. The last few days I’ve been working off a borrowed Moto G with a cracked screen, waiting for the Moto G6 series to be launched.

[1] See issue #5078

[2] I added 28 stops this way on this trip; the total number of bus stops I’ve added in Delhi is now 388, accounting for 65% of the stops mapped in Delhi 😲

Huh. Didn’t realize I took a 7 day break from mapping. The notes in my OsmAnd [1] are piling up :)

Today I learned that I can map route relations for minibuses (like those Metro feeder buses!) and “share taxis” (or as they’re locally called, “Gramin Seva”). These don’t show up on Google Maps - I hope they give OSM something of an advantage.

It’s funny how, even though public transport is one of my mapping interests, I’ve never yet done the “travel the whole of a bus route with GPS and maybe camera” dance - though of course I recognize that it’s not only (probably) more efficient, but also inevitable. Currently I just map bus stops, note their listed routes in a note=, and add them to bus routes in JOSM. The few bus routes I’ve actually traveled on I mapped ages ago, and even those I cannot claim to know the entirety of. More recently, I’ve started noting down (in OsmAnd) what buses I’ve seen, what their boards say their destination is, and (if I’m near a turn) if or where they turn - this has enriched my work quite a bit.

… See full entry

Today I mapped my 200th bus stop in Delhi, which makes up 42% of the bus stops there. [1]

As my edit history must make apparent, I’m mapping like mad these days, which sort of worries me. Nearly all the edits I see in my region’s history are mine, excluding the gigantic transcontinental commits.

Haven’t met any local mappers yet. It’s not the easiest thing to do, given that all the nearby accounts I’ve seen are either non-contributors or simply profile spammers. I’m aware of Nearby users and the tools it mentions, and I’ve given them a spin…I guess I need to put in more effort.

[1] I obtain these figures by using the Overpass Turbo query “(highway=bus_stop or public_transport=platform) in Delhi” to download in a fresh instance of JOSM [2], selecting all the objects, and looking in the Authors pane; I need to discount two bus stops which I mapped as areas rather than the usual nodes.

[2] Back to using JOSM, but now in conjunction with OsmAnd and with less Osmtracker. The time finally came for me to start making bus route relations instead of just writing down bus routes in note= fields.

For some reason, I’ve moved to using OSMand instead of OSMtracker+JOSM for adding POIs. It’s just so quick and immediate, and doesn’t require me to remember or guess about anything. (well, for most part; I tried Vespucci a few times, but it’s not nearly as simple and quick).

I did wish OSMand could put multiple POIs in the same changeset, though. It added each POI into its own changeset. There is this checkbox to close the changeset, and it seems to be there for adding modifications to a POI to its previous changeset.

…or so I thought until today, when I saw my changeset history for the first time since I started editing in OSMand. Oh. My. God.

Once again in my time with OSM, I wish I could modify my changeset comments x-P