I’m still having grief with bus routes again. I’m beginning to doubt whether it’s worth doing at all. Where I live, there are several related bus routes with lots of commonality but also lots of exceptions. They run over each other’s partial routes and self-cross all the time.

Doing one such bus route is bad enough, but trying to maintain a load of related ones is a nightmare.

I naively thought that I could take one route, copy/paste it as another relation and just change the different bits. Copy/paste doesn’t work really well in JOSM. I only seem to be able to reliably copy/paste to a “new” relation, which means that the relation-id of a route effectively keeps changing.

I’m now trying to download the XML, make changes manually and re-upload them. However, downloading a relation contains all sorts of other crap, such as “author”,”timestamp”,”revision”, which I can’t sensibly copy into a new relation.

Nobody really supports super-relations, so the only sane way is to keep dependent routes in sync manually. How do other people do this?

Still interested in mapping bus routes as relations. Decided to see if I could tidy up any body else’s.

Oh dear. What’s going on here ? Every bus route relation that I’ve looked at has all the way segments in random orders, even to the extent of mixing the southbound and northbound routes up. Going to spend hours putting them all in the right order.

This got me thinking. Was there ever a time when relations were not ordered ? There seems to be a contingent of people who want to put numbered roles next to bus stops for example. Also, I’ve noticed that OSMRM never seems to show sub-relations in a sensible order, keeping saying “3km to next segment” when the next segment actually adjoins it !

What’s going on here ?

In the area where I’m mapping, I keep coming across ways glued for no apparent reason. I have an intense dislike of gluing, except for when two ways are bound by_definition, such as a County boundary being defined to be coincident with the center line of a river.

Here, I’m trying to add roads to relations, but keep coming up on the situation where the road is glued to two landuses.

Where the two landuses are identical (usually residential), what’s the point of having two polygons butted-up to one another (glued) ? Wouldn’t it be better if these were merged into one landuse ?

I can understand having separate landuse=residential polygons where they are separated from each other by, say, a road. However, where the (line of the) road itself forms the boundary of both landuses, I can’t see the point. Does this hark back to an age when a road was considered to be just a line, of infinite thinness ?

What’s the correct way of handling this.

I’ve been splitting my local bus route up into various segments. The actual route seems to vary almost every trip and the variation is greater within suffix letters than between suffix letters!

The idea is to do it as a super_relation. Not quite sure what this is, or how it works. Information seems to be fragmented. Is route_master an example of a super_relation ?

OSM Relation Manager seems to have been down for ages now.

Would I be right in creating a route_master relation just to assemble various segment options of the bus route into the route variants ? Would any of the main renders recognise it ?

I’ve just noticed, in my bus-routing activities, that someone has apparently created a relation representing the A38. Err, why ? That info can be derived directly from the map and every road segment in this country is supposed to have exactly one road number/letter, isn’t it (with no sharing). Would I be right in deleting this relation ?

Just been trying to put all FMRs route variants on OSM as relations (and then relation/route_master).

Can anyone point me to some relation analyser that actually handles route_master. The two ones that I know about just give “relation empty” or equivalent.

I don’t want any complex analysis; I just want to see the route on a map. This they can do, but not the multiple routes inside a route_master. Why is it so difficult for them to iterate over the contained route relations and render all of them ?

Trying to connect to OSM Route Manager. It seems to be down, with just a dribble of data coming in - one packet every 10s. Is it down, or is it supposed to be like this.

Thank you, xeen, for the information on using relations for bus routes. I just wish that all this stuff was in one place.

It appears that I have to do each variant of a bus route as a separate relation. This seems very cumbersome: one of the routes here has six different opt-outs (same spine of route, but serves different roads/villages/estates at different times of the day) and all of them are possible. Each trip seems to be different; am I really expected to create 64 separate relations (albeit grouped together under route_master) ?

Am I supposed to create a separate relation for a route whose “opposite direction” is a simple reversal of the “forward direction” ? What if the “reverse” route differs only by the path it takes round a roundabout ?

Got bored with doing postboxen now. I’m as confused as h**l about FMR’s ever-changing bus routes, and their strange geometry. I’ve started to do the 43 route from Malvern to Upton s/ Severn, but I can’t get the hang of relations. Specifically, how do I get a relation marked as “incomplete” (or does this mean “incompletely downloaded”?)? How to do spurs/loops ? How to accommodate a one-way loop where both directions of a route appear to go in the same direction ? How to accommodate the situation where a route serves the same roads/stops in the same direction on the same trip ? (There’s one bus route here which serves one stop, dives into a housing estate, and emerges and serves the same stop again; sometimes the drivers go round and round this loop all day, until they reach escape velocity.)

Been trying to get some postboxes marked as gone/stolen/absent, as a result of OSMing and finding that they're not there any more. Haven't got a response out of he who maintains the dracos data.

Anybody any idea why JOSM has chosen to show this residential road in dotted lines ? Nothing special about it, except that someone has seen fit to fill in a load of pointless parameters (tunnel=0, layer=0, bridge=0 etc)

How does on denote a walkway between (in this case) two fields ? KeepRight is complaining that the way is not connected to the rest of the map.

I could do a pseudo-footway to connect it to nearby footways, but what's the point ? You can generally walk any way you like across such a field, so marking out a specific footway is a bit silly.

I seem to keep coming across naptan-source bus stops which are in the middle of buildings or otherwise in silly places.
What's the procedure for moving a bus stop, assuming I have an accurate position for such ?
I assume I can't just move it manually, because it would get overwritten with the next naptan import.

What is it with these people who glue landuse=residential to a convenient road, and then butt another landuse=residential alongside it, also glued, so that you get three ways sharing the long sequence of nodes ?

If you have two adjoining landuses the same, then you just make it one big area, the union of the two small ones, right ?

If the road in question is not residential, is it supposed to have lu=r areas on either side of it (the interpretation that I've chosen in this particular unpicking) or does the road simply go "through" a big lu=r ?

There are a few no-entry signs around here, which have no corresponding one-way sign at the other end. People around here swear blind that this means that the whole section of road "beyond" the no-entry (to where ?) is one-way.

I don't think this is correct, and have asked on FixMyStreet for clarification.

I would have thought that this meant that both sections were two-way, but that you simply could not cross in the prohibbed direction from one to the other.

Is this right, that it's merely a zero-length plug ? How would you represent this on OSM ?

I tend to be the sort of persun who works with nodes rather than ways. Does anyone know if there're any tools out there to create "nodes" based on JPEG/EXIF files ? I know I can do this with a load of photographs and a GPX trace, but I want to do it without the GPX trace, just relying on the GPS data within the images.

Just spent a pointless rainy day in Castlemorton, looking for the elusive WR13 139 Bowling Green. Nowhere to be seen. A lot of boxen have been nicked around here, but I could see no sign of straps being boltcuttered from telegraph poles or the like.

The given postcode seems far too close to the Chandler's Cross box.

I seem to be getting one non-existent box in each area that I do. Not just "removed", but "never was there". Are RM really putting fake boxes in just to detect people copying the lists ? Are other people finding this ?

Oh, and don't get me going about the glue-sniffers, people who glue ways together so that a highway and (e.g.) a common's boundary are coincident. Do these people not realise that roads have a finite non-zero width and things (street furniture) need to sit between the common boundary and the road's edge ?

MWBG

Around the area that I am surveying, a lot of roads seem to have been entered as tracks. These show up as dashed lines on the slippy map and make it very difficult to see that there is a through road in certain places. Other mapping providers don't do this. What's the difference between a track and a road ? For an example, try the coordinates in this diary entry.

Sorry, clicking on the diary entry doesn't point to any specific coordinates. They are: 52.0436051,-2.3317704

MWBG

Just had an interesting "oi, what you doing?" moment in WR9. With laptop, clipboard and smartphone, I was happily updating my notes on newly found postboxes when I was approached by a chap who'd been cutting the grass at a nearby hostelry with an ArnoldJ.
"I'm surveying postboxes; RM don\'t know where they all are !", say I.
"Oh, I didn't know that one was still working.", quoth he and off-toddled.
Must've thought I was an inspector for the DWP.

Still it's better than walking around parks with a cameraphone. Someone once set I should get a HVV so as to render myself invisible.

Does anyone know what's hap with dracos ? Stuff I put on OSM nearly a month ago still hasn't made it to Matthew's www site.

Can't understand why the Bing Maps Imagery only zooms so far. At a certain limit, it says "increase zoom level to see more detail". Who is showing this message: JOSM or Bing ? Doing a right-click increase-zoom-level does nothing. When I go to the real Bing Maps website, I can get two more levels of zoom; this is a real pig when trying to check the exact position of small objects, especially as Bing Maps has no usuable "export the coordinates under the mouse cursor" facility (The center-map-here-and-start-to-email-it fiddle doesn't work because the pushpins get misaligned on my netbook).