Bus route help

Brian_de_Ford · 2017-10-01T20:08:23.000Z

Hi

I’m adding a local bus route to my town. I have hit something I haven’t found on the wiki and I’m not sure what to do about it. Suggestions welcome.

In two locations the bus reverses into a side junction. Imagine a T. The bus is travelling left to right across the horizontal bar. Once the rear end is past the vertical bar, the bus reverses into the vertical bar then comes out going back the way it came.

In the first case the vertical bar is a short stub of road. It isn’t a through road, a residential road, or somebody’s driveway. It almost looks like a parking bay for two cars, but I’ve never seen anyone parked there. There are no road markings or signs to restrict parking or to say it’s only for buses turning or anything like that (maybe local knowledge stops people parking there). I suppose the meaning of “turning circle” can be stretched to cover it, but if so do I put the circle at the junction or at the end of the stub?

The second case is a T-junction of two residential roads used for the same reversing manoeuvre. If I use/abuse “turning circle” it only makes sense at the junction. But that looks kinda wrong because there’s no circle (yes, I know the wiki says it applies to any shape) and the manoeuvre isn’t purely turning (there’s reversing involved too). Again there’s no signage and I doubt any vehicle other than the bus uses this junction for that purpose, which means showing it as a turning circle is rather misleading to people who aren’t driving a bus because a three-point turn (K-turn for Americans) anywhere along the length of either of the roads would do…

Neither of these two are on the other bus routes that other people have previously mapped (less than half the bus routes in the town are mapped) so I can’t copy what others have done. As far as I know, this is the only bus route in or anywhere near the town that does such a thing (all the others go from Town A to Town B, possibly via Town C, whereas this one meanders around a single town and gets into obscure corners…

Yeah, maybe I’m interpreting it all too pedantically. I’m a pedantic kind of guy. But it’s better to ask questions in such cases than steam blithely ahead and commit abominations. If I’m going to commit an abomination I want to do it wittingly, not unwittingly.

Richard · 2017-10-02T21:07:50.000Z

Neither of those are physical turning circles so they shouldn’t be mapped as such. The first is probably just a highway=service stub, the second doesn’t need express tagging at all.

For the bus route relation, I wouldn’t bother including the places the bus only goes to turn - just the extent of the scheduled route which serves bus stops.

Brian_de_Ford · 2017-10-02T21:20:25.000Z

Hi Richard

Yeah, I did map the fist as highway=service for the stub. Just not run the route as far as there yet.

However, this isn’t just where the bus goes to turn, it does seem to be part of the route. There are earlier opportunities to make the same sort of turn and some of the drivers on that route take the earlier option.

Whichever turning place I choose, I have to put the route in there somehow. Do it as a magical hairpin turn?