After reading through the wiki I’ve realised the edits I have made recently could be considered an automated or bulk edit. I apologise that I did not realise this before. Basically, I have been adding bus routes using bustimes.org but before adding the routes, I have been bulk-editing the bus stops along the route to add any missing public_transport=platform, bus=yes and highway=bus_stop tags. I have also been changing the “local_ref” tags that should be just “ref” tags to ref tags. I have been checking that the ones I changed were all the correct 8 letter references before doing the bulk change.
I have also been changing any type=site+site=stop_area relations to type=public_transport+public_transport=stop_area.
I have also been correcting some NaPTAN tags on some bus stops, updating some bus stop names and adding missing bus stops using NaPTAN. Adding fixme tags to bus stops no longer searchable on NaPTAN and those that will need a survey for correct the location
I have created this topic to see if local people are happy with these changes being made and if their a specific reason that the stop references were tagged as local_ref rather than ref which doesn’t match with the wiki advice
In my corner of Essex (Tendring district) I used to try and keep bus routes up to date. I wrote an app that downloaded the stop data from naptan, the open data from wherever it used to be, and the existing OSM data using overpass, and the app showed differences. I would have been updating stops probably one by one when I first added the relations, though it would have probably shown them all as done in a single changeset when I uploaded the changes. The app stopped working at some point when the quality of opendata declined (First Essex weren’t good at keeping it updated, iirc, or perhaps it was Hedinghams).
More recently I tried to get it working again and it worked for a bit until whoever Hedinghams was owned by (Konectbuses) got taken over again by Central Connect. I don’t think their data was in BODS (I’d switched from TNDS). Checking a local route on bustimes.org it does now seem to be in BODS (last updated 30th September) so perhaps I’ll try again.
Hi sorry. I realised I put West Yorkshire in the title but not in the description. “local_ref” as I understand it is the stop number or letter at bus stations or other bus stop groups exactly like your example. Ref is for the reference number that is unique to the stop and is NaptanCode in the NaPTAN database. In West Yorkshire it seems when the NaPTAN data was originally imported the NaptanCode field was tagged as “local_ref” rather than “ref” which is what I have been correcting
My recollection was the West Yorkshire was a bit of an outlier compared to other places; when processing bus stop data I think I added the “max length of 3” check here because of it. Compare usage in West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire here.
I’m not local to West Yorkshire but am an occasional catcher of buses there, so I’m just happy to see stops updated where e.g. they’ve moved (in the 17 years since the NaPTAN import) and information about realtime departure boards and other attributes added.
A lot of the NaPTAN tags have definitely not been touched since the import 17 years ago including the incorrectly tagged “local_ref”. I’ve mainly been focusing on stop groups that should have a local_ref tag of A or B, etc in town and city centres. Ideally it wants a fresh import but I can’t imagine that’s an easy process to do without breaking things which is why I’m doing what I can manually and only updating centres or stops with significantly different names. Thinking now I could probably leave the majority of stops with the incorrect “local_ref” tags and just add the public transport and bus tags aswell as correcting the stop areas. I do wonder if anyone knows if there is a way in JOSM to bulk edit all the bus stops I’ve selected to have the “platform” role in the stop area relations