It took De Lijn 2 years to give us permission to add their data to OSM. Their Walloon counterpart did a lot better: their data is available under a suitable free license. Unfortunately I don’t see De Lijn doing the same in the short term.
What I can get fromt the database is sequences of stops for each variation of their lines. This is quite useful, but the actual itineraries are not included. So in many cases they are (educated) guesswork.
It was my hope they would be corrected, if other contributors noticed mistakes. When in doubt, I added Notes. Unfortunately there aren’t many mappers with an interest in public transport, so they mostly only degrade and are not improved very often.
Now my hope is that the PT_Assistant plugin in JOSM will spark some interest (and make it easier) to keep those bus and tram route relations up-to-date and improve them where needed.
I think it is more a case that there are not many people interested in doing maintenance work, especially for features they didn’t map themselves. If people see a route mapped, their natural inclination is to ignore it and look for something that isn’t mapped, rather than to audit it, to see if it is valid/still valid.
I’m tackling the problem from the other side, at least for users of JOSM. When you change things on the map, the validator kicks in. If you touched public transport routes, you will be notified something is broken. This summer the plugin will be extended to bicycle and hiking/foot route relations (which brings the thread somewhat back on topic )
Validated, no. For re-validated, you could add or update survey:date, if the validation was on the ground.
It is, by definition, meta-data, i.e. data about the data.
In practice, not enough people would use one to be useful, especially as there is a non-trivial amount of data entry involved, whereas all you might otherwise need to do is tick off a printout.
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