A lot of cities currently use ptv2 for a majority of their bus networks, where in the guidelines public_transport=stop_position is tagged onto a point on the road to represent where a bus stops.
The wiki says it is mandatory to add this.
However there are a fair few cities that rarely or never use public_transport=stop_position, even though most of their bus relations are tagged with public_transport:version=2 . (Eg: Toronto, Sydney, Rome etc).
Should this be treated as an optional guideline in the cities that don’t use it?
I see your confusion – public_transport=stop_position isn’t mandatory, rather the wiki is saying “Stop position nodes must be tagged with ...=stop_position”. The table there is just listing useful tags for stop position nodes in particular :-)
Usually the stop position is directly alongside/behind the public_transport=platform way/node respectively, so an explicit public_transport=stop_position isn’t super useful.
or beside the way which marks the platform or beside the way which marks the pole (public_transport=platform).
for stop area that contains all relevant elements of a train/subway/monorail/tram/bus/trolleybus/aerialway/ferry stop (type=public_transport/public_transport=stop_area) (optional).
The route- is split up into two separate direction-s and separate route variants, if required.
The route master- contains all the relations for the route directions and variants (optional).
I thought because the others say (optional), that means stop position and platform are required?
There are also many cities that have public_transport=stop_position on every bus stop, I was just confused.
The schema has evolved somewhat since the proposal process, related wiki pages explain the current guidelines >
However, marking the stop position adds no information whatsoever when it is placed on the road at the point closest to highway=bus_stop or on the tram tracks closest to railway=tram_stop. In that case it can be abandoned
Right, the proposal is about 15 years old now, so the “frozen” page is not necessarily a good guide to current practice. Over time, other wiki pages have somewhat “softened” the guidelines relative to the rather dogmatic approach of the proposal.
In my city, bus stops are mapped with the stop position on the road as well as the bus stop node. That’s mainly because I and another mapper who added many of the stops thought it was compulsory to have both, based on the wiki at that time. I’m not sure I would map the stop positions now if I was starting from nothing. They don’t seem to add much value, and they double the work of keeping everything up to date (and I have found that city bus stops move around quite a lot, and routes are reorganised fairly frequently, so ongoing maintenance is not a trivial issue).
(In fact, at the start we even thought that stop area relations were compulsory or at least strongly recommended - again because the wiki at the time gave that impression. Fortunately, after mapping a few of them, we reached the conclusion they were of no benefit for the fairly simple bus system in our city, and agreed to drop them).
So as @galen8183 said, look at current practice where you are mapping. If a city is getting by just fine without stop positions, you probably don’t want to change that on your own.
In the case of Sydney, you will find that stop_positions that mark the beginning and ending of the route have been mapped. This is done so that:
The mapping of the ways associated with the route can be clearly done. Having the way segment associated with a route clearly end at a stop_position makes it clear what is intended by the mapper.
Mapping of the node as a stop_position clearly makes the intent of the node, and it won’t be dragged to a nearby position for some other purpose (as can happen to undocumented nodes)
[Edit: Oops, same thing said just above!]
I find that the public_trasnport=stop_position nodes are most helpful for the first and last stops of a route, as they cleanly prompt for where to split the way.
