OpenStreetMap
Very unsure about how best to present bus routes in a concise manner. I don’t want to have to put the whole timetable on OSM, as it would become OOD very quickly.
Numbering the variants seems a silly idea, as that would make it difficult to add new ones or to split existing ones. I can’t think what else to do, though, so I’ll do it like that FTTB.
I don’t want to put every minor variant on, because it would make people think that there is a regular service, when it’s just occasional (and how to define 'occasional' ?) and I don’t want to miss routes off, as it will make it look like there’s no service at all.
Maybe I should add some form of BPH or BPD tag ? Should BPH relate to the average across the whole day, or just within the section of the day where it operates ? I can’t just add text like ‘no service after 1900’ as that would depend on which section of the route we’re talking about. I could do that if we could map routes as segments, but we can’t; we have to do each entire route variant as a separate relation.
Discussion
Comment from gileri on 4 May 2018 at 19:04
I would first map the variant with the largest schedule, then do at most 2-3 variants per route and would not bother with little exceptions to services. Just be sure to make the website=* tag point to official and up-to-date information to guide travelers.
I too wouldn’t number the variants unless it’s used by the bus company or operator.
I don’t know what you mean by BPH or BPD
Comment from Zverik on 5 May 2018 at 14:23
Maybe employ interval=* tag with an average interval in minutes?
osm.wiki/Proposed_features/Interval
Comment from Bobby444 on 6 May 2018 at 17:28
@gileri BPH and BPD are ‘buses per hour’ and ‘buses per day’. The bph figure is supposed to represent a regular, repeating service. The bpd figure is supposed to give an idea of the number of buses per day, but does not imply any regularity. The BPD figure is not automatically 24 x the BPH figure.