Proposal talk:Interval

Exact tagging vs tagging hints

Your proposal seems to mix exact tagging and tagging hints. F.e. that interval seems to be fairly exact in most cases (i.e. 10 minutes) but is just a hint in other cases (i.e. that 12 hours which just means twice a day, or the :evening or :weekend extensions).

I think you should choose between the two. Either you go for the hints, which you could translate to a number of terms like "frequent", "hourly", "daily" "twice-daily" etc (you'd have to make a quantitative research on what times are used, and how you can describe them). The advantage of tagging like this is that it lowers the barrier for tagging.

If you go for exact tagging, I'd try to tag the starting hours in some schema instead of the interval. Together with the average duration, it should give the routing apps quite good hints about whether to use that route or not.

You can have a key "departures", which contains a list of departure times. You could borrow syntax from opening_hours=*, but instead of using continuous ranges (denoted with the "-"), you can have intervals defined in a way like it is done in Matlab, Ruby, or combinations of those syntaxes.

F.e. departures=Mo-Fr 6:15..1:00..22:15 would mean the first bus is at 6:15, then every hour there is a bus, and the last one departs at 20:15. So instead of using startTime-endTime like regular opening hours, it would be firstTime..interval..lastTime. The rest of the values of the syntax can come directly from opening_hours=*.

Of course, you don't have to use intervals for odd routes, a route tagged like departures=Mo-Fr 8:20, 19:20 would only be driven twice a day.

If you can then tag the duration per route, or maybe the arrival times, or perhaps the duration to go from the start to a certain stop, you basically know the entire schedule.

IMO, only exact tagging justifies the usage of numbers.

You're right. The interval of 720 and 1440 is not exact and probably difficult to understand. The idea was to allow simple code e.g. using Maperitive with an if-clause for the interval. But I think it is OK to have values like "daily" or "school service". Then everybody knows what that means. The automatic handling of these values gets a little bit more difficult but it is not impossible.

The usage of exact start and end times creates a big effort especially if the timetable changes. The aim is not to tag the timetable. It should be only a hint for the frequency of the routes. As I said, the intervals have more stability than the streets or tracks the routes are using and are very much more stable than the timetable. So using exact times is too complicated to reach a wider usage. For these purposes we should use separate timetable databases that use OSM as additional visualisation option (e.g. Travic/Geops).

One word to the justification of numbers. It is a big difference, whether a route departs every 5 or 10 minutes. In the first case the companies need twice as much vehicles and drivers. The same happens between a 3 and 6 minute interval. The effect for the passenger is not that intensive (except overcrowding), but the production effort doubles. That's why I think it is OK to use exact interval numbers.

--Vicuna (talk) 11:27, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Sunday noon

Interesting idea (I was thinking about this myself, but never posted a proposal), but I think the proposal still needs work. How about the interval at sunday noon or friday evening? What about night time? Maybe combine this with opening_hours=*? -- Skunk (talk)

You are right about undefined time segments, that's why I have changed the example area with complete sets. These sets are my experience of tagging routes all over the world in the last years. As i mentioned above, the timetable shouldn't be included in OSM. I think also the start and end times of peak hour intervals are changing more often than it is good for a mapping. --Vicuna (talk) 23:38, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Days without service

How do you propose to tag the somewhat usual case of routes with regular service on weekdays, a bigger interval on Saturdays and no service on Sundays? If the other tags are, for example, interval=30, interval:saturday=60 then what should be in interval:sunday? Keimo (talk) 18:05, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

My proposal ist to use a short version: the minus (-). There is an example set for a night service. It could also make sense to use a word like none or no_service. --Vicuna (talk) 15:27, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, I somehow missed that example. I think I'll go with the most explicit no_service in this case. Keimo (talk) 08:39, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

New proposal page

Hi everyone! I recently created a new proposal for precise public transport schedules, and in the process, invented the tag "interval" for indicating the time between departures of a public transport route. I then noticed the tags linking to this proposal and was amazed to find that the exact same tag had already been proposed for the same use as I had proposed. Anyway, make sure to check out Proposed features/Public transport schedules. Leif Rasmussen