I’ve noticed a couple issues and inconsistencies with regards to how bus stands, terminals, and other such things are named across the perth bus network. I’d like to resolve some of these inconsistencies but before moving forward with the changes I’d like I thought I’d post here to see what other people have to say.
Bus stations:
A lot of Bus stands seem to use the shortened “St” naming, “X St before Y St” and such, this just seems to directly fly in the face of OSMs naming guide and should be fixed.
Some of the CAT bus stops have the Cat Id directly stapled to the name like (Something like “Yagan Square Cat Id 32” or something), this just seems to be directly copied from the transperth website and has no relation to how its actually named in real life. If you get on a CAT it will just say a plain name like “Yagan Square”, and all of the Bus stops will show the actual name in big bold colours with the actual cat id relegated to some small stamp somewhere on the bench shelter or stand. I’ve already started removing some of these superfluous “Cat Ids” on the name because they’re so obviously wrong, nobody uses them in real life (or are probably even aware they exist for that matter).
Perth Busport:
Perth Busport is unique in that busses don’t have a set stand they go to, the only get assigned a stand when they’re about to arrive. Before that, however, they are grouped into zone “A” and “B” so that people have a general idea of where to stand in the busport. It seems like someone has already mapped these “zones” in perth busport as stands, and I’m not sure how correct this is? The zones are just there to help people sit in the correct location in the busport and aren’t real “stands” in any conventional sense. I’m kind of at a loss for how this is supposed to be correctly mapped
Bus Terminals:
Just in general, I am kind of mixed on busport stands having the stand number in them such as “Curtin Central Bus Station, Stand 1” (this is doubly true for Perth Busport, which doesn’t have set stands in the first place). It seems like some other cities in Australia also do this, but in terms of the broader world and specifically places such as Europe they seem to be more used to just naming the bus stands plainly, and leaving the stand number in the local_ref. I think this is more desirable for a couple reasons:
Usually people don’t name the stand number in my experience, they’ll usually say something along the lines of “Get on at Curtin Central” or “Get off at Perth Busport” (indeed, naming the specific stand may even be a bad thing, as you could give them an incorrect stand). The Stand number is something that really only matters when you’re physically at the station most of the time.
It should be up to the router or whatever software is consuming this information to determine if they want to append the stand name, and its far easier to append the local_ref than it is to remove an indeterminate suffix like “Stand 1”, “stand 1”, “terminal 1”, “1” etc etc. Having the stand name could also lead to a “doubling up” of the stand name like “Curtin Central Bus Station, Stand 1, Stand 1”.
However, I’m not going to outright say that having the stand number in the name is wrong, and I can absolutely see people wanting to keep them.
The data in the gtfs feed might (although not always) agree with their website. (Transport for NSW appear to use two authoritative sources for their data, one for their gtfs feed and another one for the website!).
As you have indicated, mappers are a third source of information, and the degree to which the data (including names) can become consistent is helpful for downstream consumers (as opposed to simple map renderers).
To be clear this is mostly around naming, I am resistant to prescriptivism when it comes to names. And would prefer to follow what the stops and station names are actually called “on the ground” rather than whatever a csv table tells me it is “officially” named. On the red CATs, for example, the “West Perth” stop is simply announced on the bus, and commonly called, “West Perth”. However, under Transperth’s GTFS data it is called “Hay St West Perth Cat Id 92”, patently silly of course.
At least in terms of naming, the GTFS stop names that Transperth provides are identical to what is shown on their website, so there is no disagreement there. Perth Busports naming is interesting though, as instead of naming the individual stand names like “Perth Busport Stand 1” they are instead named after their zones, so there are multiple “stands” called “Perth Busport Stand B” and “Perth Busport Zone A”.
edit: although to be clear I broadly agree GTFS data could be useful!
There are also licencing issues with the GTFS, I suppose thats the reason Perths GTFS data isn’t included? Its basically under an “All Rights Reserved” Licence
Andrew can probably help in getting to an understanding whether the licence allows it to be used.
This one seems to be entirely made up by a Western Australia Government lawyer, with no references to common (templated) open sourcing of data licences used by other jurisdictions.
That said, we do have a waiver from PTA to use their CC BY 4.0 licensed data at Public Transport Authority - Organizations - data.wa.gov.au which includes stops and routes data. I can’t understand why they didn’t just apply CC BY 4.0 to the GTFS data too, I can try to ask.
In terms of the CAT Ids I’ve notice someone already added 5 or so under the ref:AU-WA:perthCAT key, would it be acceptable to add this to the perth wiki? It seems to be a better solution than just removing the Cat ids from the name outright (although personally I’d probably have the keys be something like ref:AU-WA:transperth:CAT:perth and ref:AU-WA:transperth:CAT:joondalup even if they’re a little longer)
To be consistent with usage elsewhere in the world, the feed id should be a single token, not multiple tokens.
In other words, the feed should be ‘AU-WA-Transperth’, not Transperth in the AU-WA namespace (‘AU-WA:Transperth’). See List of GTFS feeds - OpenStreetMap Wiki for examples.
These aren’t GTFS related tags, they’re just CAT Ids, the actual stand still has its own seperate ID that GTFS actually keeps track of. Maybe just ref:AU-WA:CAT:perth & ref:AU-WA:CAT:joondalup ? I don’t imagine any other thing conflicting with it, so the “transperth” namespace is redundant.
As there are only 214 instances in the transperth data, keep the tag simple:
ref:AU-WA-CAT.
No need to create namespaces for AU-WA, CAT, etc, just use the single hyphenated token (for readability) (which should be sufficient to avoid collisions with a same named tag elsewhere in the world).
Of course, if a particular public transport stop can have both a Perth CAT ID and a Joondalup CAT ID (with different values), you would need two distinct tags, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here.
Also, marking the various CAT services (i.e. the routes) with fee=no would be very helpful to downstream data consumers.
The Joondalup Cats and Perth Cats have separate IDs, they cant both be on the same element but “Cat Id 1” for perth and “Cat Id 1” for Joondalup are different. They aren’t unique across the entire network.
edit: although I agree about ref:AU-WA-CAT, as long as its ref:AU-WA-CAT:perth and ref:AU-WA-CAT:joondalup. There also used to be Fremantle CATs so that leaves the option of something like ref:AU-WA-CAT:fremantle in the future if it ever comes back.
