I realised today that the bus routes in Stockport are out of date, referencing buses that are no longer running, or that have changed route since the Interchange was built. On a bit of digging I suspect it’s not just Stockport.
Is someone trying to update these routes, locally or nationally, based on any data source? I can see bustimes.org have what seems to be up-to-date information which they’re mapping nationally.
Does it matter? Is OSM being used as a source of truth for bus route data, or is this generally sourced from more specialist public transport services?
I did a bit of searching for conversations about this but didn’t find anything, feel free to point me to an existing discussion if I missed it.
I regularly use bustimes.org too, but it’s still useful to have bus stop data in OSM, for a couple of reasons - it’s available offline, it contains more information than just “buses stop here” such as “is there a pole?” and "can I sit down?
As an example, here is a stop in bustimes.org and here is the OSM one. If you’re reliant on knowing the name that will be announced on the bus to know when to get off bustimes.org is unhelpful…
Its useful to be able to look at the map when we are camping to see where the buses go and if it’s anywhere useful.
One that sticks in my mind in Cornwall, rather than a nice trip to St Austell it went to Tesco on the edge of Bodmin so useful information unfortunately not a visit to an old town with nice pubs.
I think it does matter that bus services are mapped. bustimes.org is a great resource which I use after I have decided which bus route I want - which I get after using OSM.
OSM allows me to look at where buses come from and goto. Not available on other maps.
I do try to update the buses in Lancashire, i’ve also covered Wigan, Bolton, parts of Bury and Rochdale..
So I do encourage you to update Stockport buses.
I use bustimes as a source, Lancashire CC has a bus changes page and a list of their downloadble routes.
I agree that the locations and features of bus stops are useful data.
If bus routes are useful data, some sort of tooling that helps to keep them updated seems prudent. E.g. subway validator, but checking to see if at least the bus stops in a route match up.
(Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just import the routes entirely as updates..)
I also like Relatify (https://relatify.monicz.dev/) but it does rely on the stops being present, and a valid set of PTv2 routes and master routes being available. I found (when adding routes around St Austell Tesco) that it was brilliant at populating routes, even if you had to create the relations (and leave them momentarily empty) in another editor.
However, I hear Relatify is also suffering from the adverse internet weather that’s battering Overpass.