Since www.openstreetmap.org is the first thing people stumble up to when OSM is in the news or so, It might be a good idea to add some features to make it more attractive.
Here’s a few of my ideas (just rough idea’s, I have no technical background so I don’t know if they’re possible)
the OpenTransportMap rendering could make use of the “colour” key used in almost all Public Transport Relations to display the color of the specific route
also about OpenTransportMap: instead of displaying the “ref” key (= line number) beside the street it is tagged to, let it be rendered the same way as the “ref” key for the motorways (the small placed on the road)
Routing is already implemented in the frontpage by Nic Roets based upon the YOURS routing stack. Till now -as I’m told- this is not enabled on www.osm.org because the added complexity and fear that the routing server will not be able to handle the load. As it happens, I’m currently expanding the number of routing backend servers.
You think something like Google maps have?
I think it’s doable, currently only limitation would be hardware resource i guess.
However great thing about OSM is all the software based on OSM and there are some specialized in Public Transport(some are down currently).
But yes, it would bi nice if some of it would be more easily accessible and better integrated into main site.
Lambertus: OK, good to know. Thanks again for the huge amount of work and effort you’re putting into things like YOURS.
Misabrzi: I think I read somewhere that OSM is supposed to be different than google maps but if different means less practical, it might be a good idea to be inspired by their maps service. For example “interactive” POI’s: when clicking on a POI, display a small popup (I think that’s not too diffucult) with the info, for example the address, website, opening hours, etc…
I knew about the http://3liz.fr/public/osmtransport/ website and was surprised to not find it anymore. I think this is a nice example of how to render public transport properly.
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