I’m finding it hard going mapping bus routes, due to all the various anomalies and trying to shoehorn that into OSM’s guidelines.

I’ve just put together some 8 relations, all notionally the same route number in the same direction. This is a maintenance nightmare, but I suppose I could come up with some sort of tool for automatically checking for consistency.

Doing them as seprate relations, as OSM requires, now makes it meaningless to put an interval tag on, because, as separate routes, they don’t look at all “regular”: the interval is only meaningful across the whole set of route variants.

Having to do a route as e.g. 2 relations, just for a minor peak-only variant is insane, the main reason for which is this:

You can’t tag a small section of a route (unless there’s a way of putting arbitrary text in line with stops and ways in a relation).

I need some form of route segmentation, which will be supported by the renderers, and which will be seen as a contiguous route by any routing software. If I can’t see any sane pre-existing precedent, I’m going to have to do my own thing. I’m imaginging a structure like this:

interval=60 Stop1 Stop2 Way1 Way2 interval=15 Stop3 Stop4 Way3 Way4 Way5 Way6

Stop3 Way3