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Halifax Bus Route Notes

Posted by diwesser on 3 November 2025 in English.

I seem to have started on the questionable task of adding all the bus routes in Halifax.

I’ve been grabbing the route description from the Halifax Transit website, creating the route relations via Id and then adding to the relation with OSM Simple Route Editor. (I’d prefer to use OSM Relatify, but it seems to take a while to notice that the relation has been created or is having some other issue.) I have been using Relatify to verify that the route is correctly ordered and connected. I have also used the sort feature in JOSM “PT Assistant” plugin to deal with grumpy route alignment.

I have been doing inbound and outbound legs of the bus route as separate routes to avoid the complications from using the same way twice. In the case of the 1, they were already split like that with a master route that joined the two which seems rather elegant. But, it may be worth seeing if there is a way to join the halves together after the fact.

Here’s the overpass-turbo query I cobbled together to find current OSM routes (it mostly worked):

[out:json][timeout:25];
// gather results
(
  relation["type"="route"]["route"="bus"]["network:wikidata"="Q14875719"]({{bbox}});
  relation["type"="route"]["route"="bus"]["operator"="Halifax Regional Municipality"]({{bbox}});
  relation["type"="route"]["route"="bus"]["network"="Halifax Transit"]({{bbox}});
);
// print results
out meta geom;

So far I have found these routes either in OSM or via the current list of route descriptions:

See full entry