Proposal talk:Side of stop

Discuss Proposed features/Side of stop

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At the moment I'm tagging bus stops as distinct nodes to indicate on which side of the street they are. What happens with this proposal if somebody reverses the sense of the way? With house numbers it's possible to use the order of increasing numbers, but for bus stops I don't see how to mitigate this kind of error caused by editors reversing the direction. --Polyglot 20:52, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Wouldn't "forward" and "backward" (compared to the direction of the way) be more useful? This way, the tag would be useful to routers, since the meaning of "right" and "left" depends on which side of the road traffic drives on. -- User:Andrewpmk - 08:09, 26 January 2008

With "forward" renderer would have to know on which side of the road traffic drives on :). I was even thinking about reuse of oneway tag, but it has a big additional drawback --- no direct connection with bus/tram_stop tag. The question is, is it easier to tell renderer or router on what side of road traffic goes? --Slimak 21:01, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

"Forward" and "backward" would refer to the direction of the way. i.e. forward is in the same direction as the direction of the way, backward is in the opposite direction. Thus we know for sure whether the bus stop is e.g. northbound or southbound without knowing what country it's in. "Left" and "right" indicate which side of the street the bus stop on. The left side of the street on a way going from south to north could be a northbound or a southbound stop depending on what country the stop is in.

If we want to render "forward" and "backward" on a map I would suggest placing a dot or icon in the middle of the way, with an arrow indicating in which direction the bus stops if the stop is a one way stop. That way, we don't need to know what country we're in. Andrewpmk 03:24, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Good point. So only problem of editor help during way reversal is left. --Slimak 12:06, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Without help from editing programs there will be problems with reversal of ways. One way tag is the best example. For house numbers there was also proposal with geographical direction, instead of left/right. It can be used here too, but it does not code into tag value if it is side of the road on which stop is, or is it direction in which stop work.

Mapping with additional node is nice, but if the node is not connected to road - it gives information only to human looking at map. And there is no possibility to create visually different icons for one way and two way stops. There is possibility of resolving direction change problem with ugly hack. A bus stop in form of way connected to the road --- something like that:

       .
.______!_____.

Where a dot is a node, line is way. Horizontal way is a road, and vertical way is tagged as bus_stop. But I don't think this solution is better than implementig some intelligence into editors... --Slimak 21:01, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

I say amenity=bus_stop should be just used as a seperate node (maybe relation to the road). Most places bus stops don't have one exactly opposite the road anyway. A direction or heading tag could say the place it's heading, in London at least they say 'Towards Next-town/Other-town' on the bus stop sign. -- User:LastGrape -- 11:52, 12 April 2008

• I don't think there's enough information here to really be going in with. I agree that this is a general problem - should this only be limited to stops? Also, check out the discussion at Buses. --achadwick 17:09, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
• I agree, this is not thought through. This is probably only possible with relations. EsbenDamgaard 08:39, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

• But there is need for a solution !!

I would suggest using "forward" and "backward" as this is also easy to understand for new users. But I do agree, that the editors do also have to know about direction of tags and turn them automatically if the direction of a way changes. Otherwise we would end up in a mess…

BTW: In general I prefer simple solutions. The concept of relations is good, but not easy to understand for starters. But we do have each day new mapers, we can not educate them first in a two day course. aikon, 24 June 2008

I think it is simple enough. Marking a stop next to the road is quite obvious. One can argue that we actually map the bus stop sign. Through a relation these "POIs" are suddenly related to a bus line which in turn is related to a way (and info like line number and serving pulse). We got all the info we need, and its way better than assigning bus lines to bus stops, as it does not say anything about the actual route to connect these stops and is way more difficult to reedit when a bus route changes. --Itschytoo 13:41, 24 June 2008 (UTC)