Let’s not have 3 datasets, 2 are complex enough, and let’s just assume that the GTFS name is identical to the physical stop signs. If a mapper ever encounters an exception we’ll handle it individually.
Under that assumption, is there an agreement that GTFS should always override user changes for name tags? (NOT location)
Every override would still generate a log message, to warn the provider of an error if present, and to contact the user if needed.
Let’s just keep it as it is and just add a clear guideline: name = what’s on the sign. When a mapper overrides a GTFS name, I contact them asking if this was an armchair guess or a legit survey. If no reply / not a survey, put GTFS back in, otherwise do nothing; it’s a GTFS error (or send it upstream if we ever establish a communication channel with MOT).
The update is currently underway. Some manual intervention is required in some cases:
The removal of stops that are part of route relations causes JOSM conflicts that I’m manually resolving. For most routes I am simply removing the stop from the route.
Many routes are possibly out of date. No one is actively maintaining them.
There were other minor conflicts that were trivial to resolve (e.g. user adding stops as members of highways).
Can upload issues cause this? The JOSM upload was interrupted multiple times, and I switched the chunk size in the midst of the upload at some point in an attempt to mitigate interruptions.
No duplicates appear for me when I run the script on a local copy of the older stops.
There are cases where people have glued bus stops to roads. The bot moved some of those stops, dragging the road along with them. I am manually fixing these cases one by one. See also this discussion: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/49148167
I am fixing this now. For anyone who has done fixes: Please make sure that after the fix, the stops remains precisely where the bot has moved it, the exact same coordinates.
I’ve done lots of duplicate cleanups. As of now we still have 545 bus stops that do not appear in GTFS, most of them are duplicates with the real GTFS stops meters nearby. Most of them are clustered in Jerusalem, Ber Sheva, and Tel Aviv district. If you are familiar with one of those areas, you can help by cleaning up duplicate stops. Most of them are marked with “fixme=Suspected duplicate stop. Flagged by SafwatHalaby_bot (flag-gtfs1).”
Add public_transport=platform, bus=yes, for compatibility with “public transport v2” and for future routes.
remove the gtfs:verified tag. Reasons:
[list=*]
The Israel gtfs database is rather accurate most of the time
The update bot tolerates and respects user changes. If a user finds a wrong stop, they should simply update or delete it rather than fiddle with the tag.
The update had a minor positive unexpected effect on https://www.efobus.com/: When you scroll around their map, the markers need a few seconds to appear, but thanks to the synchronized blue square markers on the background map, you can see the position of the stops even before the click-able markers appear.