Hello dsh4,
I am glad you like my work
I wish you’ve brought up the issue earlier. This has been decided after several messages and after I waited a long time for comments. Nevertheless, I am open for change. Let us discuss this. As of now, I believe it’s not worth the effort to handle this problem. Here are some reasons.
This change is based on past experience. Nearly all mapper bus stop edits are based on armchair fixes. They are not the “on the ground name”; the mapper sees a typo, or a stop having the name of a long gone road, and changes it. Even if the change makes sense, it is not OK to change it so long as the actual stop name has not changed on the sign and in the MOT data. It seems most mapping nowadays is armchair mapping, and that kind of mapping cannot possibly tell the physical name differs from the MOT name.
Experience also shows that we as a community are incapable of maintaining the stops. There are 27k stops that change rapidly every day. Maintenance requires a full time job for several people. The staleness of the stops prior to the introduction of the script, and the “gtfs:verified” tag, which I removed yesterday, are both testimony of this. That tag was effectively dead. We don’t have the power to physically survey the stops and verify them and flip the gtfs:verified flag or update the stops. An “on_the_ground_name” tag would be the new stale “gtfs:verified”, consuming 27KiB multiplied by ~10 or more with little use.
The physically printed bus stop name on the sign is increasingly becoming less important. Digital systems screens, which are becoming increasingly common right next to the stops, voice systems in buses, other apps and services, they all use the digital MOT name. Consequently, the digital names are highly maintained.
MOT has an active support E-mail. They are willing to change their data if it has mistakes. Highly confusing mistakes can be fixed on their part, and trivial mistakes too. Since the data is heavily relied on, perhaps they are even willing to physically change the on-the ground name for critical mistakes, though I have never tried this.
If this is a solely theoretical problem, then I think we ought to ignore it. A “third dataset” in addition to the two existing ones worsens everything - the code, mapper confusion, consumer confusion, the amount of warning logs I get, the debugging time required, the Israel map size, and more. However, if actual problems are arising because of this, then that’s something to consider.
So I think it should be added only if it’s really needed, and right now, I am not convinced it is. But I am open minded and would love to hear other opinions.