Editing of bus routes - could/will it get easier ?

General talk
1

Not sure where this should go, but I guess it’s the editors problem.
I want to be able to click on a bus route and edit it by clicking on the roadways to be included. I know it’s just a case of going round your route, clicking on the ways and adding the relations, but it’s still a pain. I’d like to be able to select a route, then for the exisitng route to light up for me, and to just click on and off sections of the route. And then for this route to be shown, this is very important.
I guess part of the problem is that they arent rendered normally, they are just attributes of the way objects. From what I understand you need a special rendering engine like OSMI to see the routes.

  1. is the above correct (I’m new, obviously)
  2. and if so, is there any discussion about moving forward to something a little bit more usable. It seems like we are nearly there, but may be it’s a lot harder than that.

there’s an invalidated request here
http://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/2857
when it says “already does it”, I take it that means the add relaton dialogue, not “click on route and get it drawn for you”. Even just to have that list of relation members temporarlily draw the route you are currently editing would be nice, you cant see what you’ve ended up with.

2

IMO that’s a problem that should be solved by someone writing a dedicated bus route editor. To add that into Potlatch 2 would be introducing a completely new “mode” into Potlatch 2 - in other words, a different way of operating the program. We don’t do that: we want to keep it simple and consistent.

Don’t forget that you can speed up the process in P2 by selecting multiple ways at once (command-click) then clicking ‘Add to relation’ to add them all to a relation at the same time.

3

In terms of the route being shown in the editor, this could be done with custom styles.

Potlatch 2 does show roads that are part of a route relation with a blue border, though this is sometimes not very obvious. And it doesn’t show which route it is part of, so confusing if you have several bus routes in the area.
You could make a style (for Potlatch 2 or JOSM) specifically for bus routes, so they are clearly highlighted on the map. Possibly with different colours for each route, and showing route numbers/names. I might have a go at making something like this for JOSM sometime.

You could also try the JOSM Public transport plugin, though I’m not sure what it actually does.