What is your opinion on 2, given that it sometimes is there and sometimes not?
School buses can be either heavy or light buses, so perhaps it is best not to classify them as a subclass of either. It is simpler to keep them all on the same level. No hierarchy is OK for me.
I moved it up in the hierarchy. Thanks to everybody for contributing. Key:access: Difference between revisions - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Some school buses can be open to the public, others are private (privately operated, or private as in operated by a local government to exclusively transport a set of children to their local school). I think it would be very inappropriate to add school bus lines that are not publicly accessible since the only result is that OSM then has a map of where school kids live - and where they go to school.
I don’t see the issue with knowing where school kids live and where they go to school (I guess for the latter it will be sufficient to search for amenity=school). Generally, this tag is not intended to map private school bus routes, but to map school bus specific traffic rules (e.g. no left turn except school bus, or similar).
Catchment areas are often published areas anyway, so “there’s a child within walking distance of this stop” probably isn’t going to be that big a risk?
It depends. In some places, there might be a stop outside a house without neighbours. Either way - whats the point of adding data that is both extremely fluid (routes can change each year), and nobody can use.
Has anyone suggested adding this kind of data? I don’t think tagging signposted access restrictions where they exist is in any way similar to mapping routes.
Round here the school busses all seem to be farmed out to normal bus operators and operate via normal stops that have timetables saying when the bus turns up. I don’t know if there actually is any restriction on who can use them, just no one in their right mind would voluntarily get on a bus with a bunch of screaming kids.
Well, school buses are not private transport. I understand private transport to be when parents take their children to and from school in their own private car (we call this “parent taxi”).
I know rural areas where the only local public transport is a bus line that runs once or twice in the morning in one direction (to school or to the school centre in the next larger town/city) and at lunchtime/afternoon in the other direction. These routes are often integrated into the normal regular service, but are timetabled to coincide with school hours and can also be used by non-students. In fact, they are school buses, and in some cases both the buses and the stops are labelled as such.
But even if the group of users is restricted to pupils, the number and diversity of pupils is so different that this is not individual transport, but public transport. At least here in Germany, this is in most cases publicly organised and publicly financed.
It may be different if a public school organises private school bus transport at its own expense.
There will never be a single solution that fits all cases all over the world.
Well if we are picking on words: I meant private as in how we use access=private. It’s a terrible word to describe things. Just like using public transport. I prefer the Scandinavian term “kollektivtrafik”. “Private” and “public” jumbles it all up with ownership and who’s paying - the key is collective transport where many passengers share a vehicle - the more the better. Otherwise we can say that a city school bus is public transport but Flixbus is private transport.
And like you said, there is no single solution: Robin, 6, tar helikopter till plugget