Questions about Mapping Relation type=route in JOSM

Help and support
1

I want to understand what are the best practices for mapping relations of the type route in JOSM.

Is there any specific video that you would suggest for someone who wants to learn how to map routes in JOSM ?

I find the UI/UX confusing for Relations in JOSM, and would like to see how experts use it.

I also have a few questions about editing existing Relations:

  1. If I break up a way which is a member of a relation (to add the bridge tag for example), does the new segment get added automatically to the relation, or does the path of the relation break?

  2. Is there someway in the OSM ecosystem, to check if a relation has been broken, or get a list of broken relations ?

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What's a good alternative to http://ra.osmsurround.org?
2

Any modern OSM editor will maintain relation membership for split ways (and merged ones), the main problem is retaining proper ordering, which is an issue for public transport routes as the tagging scheme itself doesn’t provide enough information to allow automatic sorting, but the PT schemes depend on it. Most editors should currently manage to do that though (maintain the ordering).

3

This display in the Relation-Editor is showing gaps within the relation/route.

grafik
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Also, there are QM tools like ra.osmsurround.org .

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4

If you’re interested in public transport routes, then PTNA could help you, provided your area is configured there. Adding your area isn’t a big deal though.

5

I think that that picture could perhaps do with some explanation. What information is it trying to communicate?

As an example, if I download object https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/77161 (a route relation) and click “edit”, I get this:

Screenshot_20260226_105815
Screenshot_20260226_105815912Ă—606 91.2 KB

I’ve scrolled down there to show that there are some red highlights in the 2nd and 3rd columns. The heading of the 2nd column is “refers to”. The 3rd column has no heading.

The help button opens in something in JOSM’s internal help browser (not useful) but a web search for the text finds the content here. The help text suggests that the unlabelled column means “on the right information about neighbor ways’ connections useful for consistency checks like checking that the members of a multipolygon form closed ways or that a route is a complete line without missing some ways in the middle”, but does not explain what the displayed symbols mean or how they help towards this goal.

What does seem to be the case is that no attempt is made to see if an unsorted relation is contiguous.

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