For instance, the sign at this bus stop reads “Jersey Road”. In the NaPTAN dataset, its Common Name is “Jersey Road Hornchurch”, presumably to disambiguate from other Jersey Roads elsewhere.
On one hand using the local name is probably more recognisable for people using the map for navigation; on the other the national name is probably better for querying.
Is there any consensus around this?
I’ve tried to use “what it says on the sign” for name. There are other fields, such as naptan:CommonName for the components of the NaPTAN name.
As an aside on names, I’ve also recorded names used by bus companies on displays and in announcements where they differ from name (such as here and here). That happens quite often.
As an aside, does Naptan in any way give a precise location (lat lon, NGR, etc)?
I’ve only found “Main Street | Uffington | North-East” (street | locality | direction of bus travel). Maybe that’s as good as it gets.
Yes, each stop has a location and various third party maps and apps can be used to view them. For example, here is the bus stop at the top of this thread in bustimes.org’s visualisation of that data. However, “a precise location” doesn’t always mean “where the bus stop actually is” - it may have moved, or NaPTAN may never have been correct in the first place. As an example of this the southbound stops here were moved down the road. The update in OSM happened within a couple of days of the move in real life, but NaPTAN and even the buses themselves** haven’t been update with the new stop locations.
** when stopping at the new locations the audio and video announcements say the bus is on its way to the next one.