I am an OSM contributor from Bandung, Indonesia, with a particular interest in public transport mapping. Over the past few months, I have noticed that one aspect seems to be missing from common OSM practice: mapping specific types of bus stop poles or signs. This kind of data could help passengers understand what to expect when looking for a bus stop, and it could also help transport authorities and other stakeholders to maintain public transport information more effectively.
I found several existing approaches to map bus stop poles, but each of them has its own limitations:
Use key:pole with value yes/no. This method is acceptable but it lacks detail about the type of bus stop pole.
Use key:sign. This approach is used in Vespucci app’s preset. It is not specific to poles, as it may also refer to shelter name signs or information boards mounted on shelter walls.
Use highway=traffic_sign. This tag cannot be combined with bus stop tagging, which uses highway=bus_stop. While traffic_sign=* could be used in some cases, not all bus stop signs fall under traffic sign regulations, and many are intended only for passengers rather than for road users. Therefore, this approach is not always suitable.
Use key:flag. This is the opposite of first method as it is only specific to one type of bus stop pole.
With the help of Chris2map on OSM Wiki, I decided to use key:pole for this purpose. I added three types of bus stop poles in my city as values for that key. I introduced several values based on the types of bus stop poles commonly found in my city. I have also mapped bus stops in Bandung using this tagging approach, documented it on wiki, and applied the data on my organization’s website.
I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions on this approach.
pole=no is one of the ways that’s used in the UK and Ireland to say “there is no pole”. Another is flag (in the context of bus stops I’ve always seen that as meaning the same thing as pole) and a third is physically_present=no. In each case a bus does stop there but you might not be able to tell that unless you see other people waiting for a bus.
I use this code to decide how to display bus stops. One with a pole looks like this, without like this.
What value of pole=* do you think would be best for stops like this one? (The red-and-white pole for route 47)
From top to bottom, it has the transport agency’s logo, the route number(s), the stop ID/ref, and whether the stop is wheelchair accessible. But no traffic sign, not a large structure so not a totem, and nothing’s attached on the side of the pole so not really a flag? Another value, then?
Locally this is usually called a “stop pole”, but a pole=pole tag might raise some eyebrows…
Right. I am not planning to deprecate the use of pole=yes and pole=no since they are pretty useful. In Indonesia, pole=no is also used for tagging bus stops without pole marker, which is also an ongoing public transport issue here.
Edit: Looks like I forgot to list pole=no on the wiki. I am going to fix it in a moment.
In my city, this sometimes happened because stakeholders do not have centralized database of bus stop facility, let alone bus stop pole type. That is part of the reason why I started this campaign
For this case, I usually use pole=totem;flag.
I personally would tag this as pole=yessince I don’t know the name. Further discussion with local mappers maybe needed.
