Talk:Key:bus bay

Add example

To provide information about bus bays, add the bus_bay=* tag to the highway=* way representing the street.

Please add one usage example. Else it is not clear. Jidanni (talk) 12:34, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

How to tag a physically seperate bus bay?

It seems to me, that using highway=service for physically seperate bus bays goes against Tag:highway=busway, which was introduced to replace service=busway. It seems strange to me, that a seperate busbay should not qualify as a busway (albeit a small one). In the article for highway=busway, the recommendation is to tag physically seperate bus bays with highway=service and bus_bay=*. This does not work, since key:bus_bay represents bus bays off to the side of the main carriage way. It cannot be used when the whole way is a bus bay. Is there just no established way to tag it correctly? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Linus W Frische (talk • contribs) 11:46, 1 December 2024‎

I'm drafting a proposal to introduce service=bus_platform (historically service=bus_bay but that got too many complaints regarding the ambiguity about what counts as a bus bay). I definitively agree that bus_bay=* is a bad fit (akin to how you don't use sidewalk=yes to mark) nor that service=busway should be used on them (purely by definition) but I do agree with the idea that these ways should be highway=service because they serve as a secondary role to a main trunk. These are for two reasons:

• In railway terms, they're passing loops, tagged with service=siding rather than usage=* which points towards highway=service rather than highway=busway.
• On-carriageway bus bays are tagged with bus_bay=* and not with busway=* (even pre-deprecation) and they don't count as lanes (let alone bus:lanes=* resp. lanes:bus=*) either. The busway=* translates to highway=busway as a separate way which by definition are either bus roads or separated bus lanes. If you wouldn't use busway=* in one situation, you wouldn't use highway=busway in that situation either. Ergo, the equivalent of bus_bay=* is highway=service with service=bus_bay (or equivalent tag).
• Ways inside bus station are likely to be tagged as highway=service than highway=busway (outside of potentially a trunk, especially if the station is located in the middle of a busway) so the platform accesses should be of the same classification or lower than its trunk (another way of seeing this is that bus terminals are to bus bays what parking lots are to parking bays).

The tl;dr is that they don't fulfil the classification of a highway=busway IMO due to a (relatively) lower importance compared to the actual busway, conflict with ways of bus terminals and similar function as railway passing loops. --ManuelB701 (talk) 14:20, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Clarification on when to actually use this tag if it can be converted to a driving lane.

In relation to the above discussion, I'm actually wondering if if a bus "bay" isn't really a temporary extension should be tagged as such and whether they should count as proper lanes in some situations instead (basically, you'd be using busway=* pre-deprecation in that situation instead). A hypothetical example is one where the bus bay is located on a shoulder so that the carriageway as a whole stays constant in width the whole time instead of temporarily (see also that diagram I made). A more typical example is one where a bus bay is right in front of a turn lane and there is no physical separation between either of those or the bus bay is right in front of an intersection and would have been a turn lane if it weren't reserved for buses to pick up passengers. Furthermore, here in Germany, bus bays which end at intersections also are usually handled through BOStrab (dash) instead of StVO (colour) lights which usually are only used for bus lanes and in another case, a user was thinking that bus lanes should use bus_bay=* over bus lane tagging because a bus stop was nearby (it doesn't because the lane still continues).

I'm of the opinion that it follows the rules of parking: If the bay were a parking space and you'd use parking=lane, you count it as a dedicated bus lane regardless of length, if it's parking=street_side, you'd tag it as bus_bay=*. --ManuelB701 (talk) 19:25, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

In other countries, vehicles are often allowed to travel on bus stop sections at the beginning or end of a lane. Those aren't always regulated as bus lanes. Then they are not motor_vehicles:lanes=* + bus:lanes=*
I do agree parking:*=* can be referred to. Make bus_stop=* to be eg bus_stop:*=lane , bus_stop:*=shoulder , bus_stop:*=bus_bay , etc. But this doesn't exactly describe bus stops starting or ending a lane. Worse, we are having a related argument over parking:*=* recently. https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/tagging-lanes-that-you-can-park-or-drive-in/124180/
—— Kovposch (talk) 08:47, 22 January 2025 (UTC)