Hello; I’ve been watching this thread and the issues with the Luton Guideway for a couple of days now, and have now joined to join the discussion here. I have a personal project been created at the moment to allow me to record my journeys at work so I can see where I’ve been, a nice little record of my career, I also work ‘on the buses’, so feel I could add some key insight here as to how it’s impacting routers but also how industry interprets data.
Following the changes made by ‘LordGarySugar’ on the Luton and it seems Ipswich guideways, it’s prevented the three routing systems my site was developed around. I use Valhalla, a modified Brouter as well as one made by a site called ‘Trainlog’. I have spent time reviewing how to adapt and amend the code/script to enable a change in, what I feel, has been a pretty general consensus across the maps for quite a time on the site. I utilised the maps to assess tagging, which seemed consistent globally until these changes, reviewed discussions and other resources to ensure the code would work and match up with OSM tags, which it did until a month ago, and then again 2/3 days ago. I see there’s been some battles over the guideway but the ‘bus=designated’ tag has been consistent across all the changes.
All these systems mentioned above rely on a valid ‘bus=’ tag, however when any of the three systems listed above see the ‘bus=no’ tag it prevents total access onto the guideway. I can see above ‘vehicle=no’ or the currently applied ‘access=no’ has been said to work alongside these tags. That is useful, as my system checks for that and then also the ‘bus=*’ tag, however without a recognised ‘bus=*’ tag our systems will not allow routing down the guideway. I’ve spent the last couple days trying to work around this, but it all comes back to ‘lookup.dat. not recognising the other suggested tag of ‘bus=private’
The ‘bus:guided=designated’ doesn’t have much impact, the system ignores it, its irrelevant to the systems so that isn’t creating any conflict in any of the systems I’ve coded and tried to amend to work around this current issue, as well as the proposed changes.
In relation to Casey_boy’s comment above, we are professionals who know what routes are guided buses only, what buses are guide wheel equip and even have markers in the cabs to aid drivers to know it’s there (as well as seeing the guide wheels on First use checks. A lot of operators have been moving to a new system, including Traveline, which now utilises OpenStreetMap as their mapping system, displaying to passengers the route, how to access the stops (e.g. walking route, transfers etc) and the way the bus will go on a router profile generated route displayed on an OSM map (With some intervention to ensure it goes the registered way of the route. Something I’m quite happy about as the amazing community here have the most up to date maps needed meaning passengers can be shown accurate routing.
I have also read above about the not mapping/tagging to make third party systems work. I agree, however I feel the third party systems (like mine and others) have been disrespected by a change made by one user (and reading the comments above, it is only one user who’s gone wildly away from the standard tagging used globally), who hasn’t consulted the community here about their concerns/proposals to change it from the current ‘normal’ about the tags on the guideways, which has now lead to multiple systems having issues and from what I can see multiple users here trying their best to resolve it back to what is in documentation used to advise users how things should be done, you may well say it shouldn’t be taken as ‘Gospel’ however it’s the only support that is currently there to enable them to tag the maps appropriately as well as code to work with such tagging across the OpenStreetMap tiles.
