FlixBus routes in Switzerland

Communities Switzerland
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Any idea how these are maintained and what’s their purpose? I couldn’t find a page about them. Sample at Relation: ‪Flixbus 1725: Torino, Vittorio Emanuele => Genève, gare routière internationale‬ (‪9363047‬) | OpenStreetMap
Some street parts have many such relations (making it hard to find other things).

Beyond stops, are the buses actually meant to follow that route or is it just a suggestion? Some routes are not the one I would take.

Occasionally, I notice a bus in an odd place it likely ended up by following some detour around construction or other road closure.

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Seems that Bus 1725 does no longer / not exist according to their GTFS data

PTNA also provides an overview and analysis of the Flixbus routes in OSM

ptna public-transport gtfs

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Thank you. Interesting. I will have a look in more detail.

There is still a bus service between Geneva and Torino.

I asked the user who created the relation for input as well.

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Flixbus routes are not as fixed as city bus routes. In principle I think they have a coarse route, they obviously have fixed stops, but in between they can drive better routes according to cicumstances. The few times I took a Flixbus long distance, the drivers used regular navigation systems.

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According to the user who created the one mentioned above, these are no longer updated since COVID.

Do we keep them around and mark them as historic?

If there is no defined route, it’s unclear to me why we wouldn’t leave the routing to engines.

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After an update, the lines are now visible, combined with local bus routes. There are currently 35 there. If nobody is maintaining them, I’d mark them as historic.

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We usually don’t keep data that is no longer valid, see for example https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Lifecycle_prefix:

“Historic objects with no relevance to current state of an object generally do not belong in OpenStreetMap.”

(One exception are objects that no longer exist but are still visible on aerial images.)

Therefore, i suggest removing former Flixbus routes.

As for current Flixbus routes (or other international bus routes), i am in favour of removing the road members and only keeping the stops, for the reasons of unstable courses, minimal benefit and difficult maintenance.

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True, I noticed a municipality disappearing from OSM within hours.