@Safwat - I’m happy to defer to you on how to handle conflicts. You have far more experience than I there.
@zstadler - This may sound heretical, but why don’t we import the routes without importing the ways? I realise that the schema specifies that members ways are mandatory, but (1) adding the stops serves a real use-case (it enables apps to be written that can’t be written without it; travellers wouldn’t care whether the precise path is represented in the dataset, so long as they see where the busses stop), (2) adding the stops would be an accurate, incomplete edit, which is generally a good thing (as opposed to an inaccurate edit, which would be frowned upon); which is to say, we shouldn’t let the perfect (having routes that have both ways and stops) be the enemy of the good (having routes that have just the stops); (3) since OSM is a wiki, data consumers already have to be defensive and validate the relations they work on.
@anonymous_gushdan_mapper - As I said, the thinking is that if we import the data, somebody will write a smartphone app that uses it for navigation. That app would be usable in any country that has bus routes defined in OSM. At the moment it’s not possible to have such an app for Israel because OSM doesn’t have the necessary data for Israel (though we have the bus stops with gtfs:id’s — that really is fantastic, but doesn’t enable navigation apps to be written based on OSM data alone). Re good-looking, I don’t think that’s a valid argument. OSM should map the world as it is. If you don’t find the shapes of bus routes aesthetically pleasing, ask the MOT to change the routes… but if the world is spaghetiish, then OSM’s map data should contain spaghetti. Regarding your argument about the transport map, isn’t the right answer to that to ask the maintainers of the osm.org slippy map (carto) to add a mode that shows only railroads but not bus lines? Again, the primary criterion for map data is accuracy.