If #OpenStreetMap had an award for the most used tag for the sole purpose that something shows up on the map, highway=bus_stop would be a promising contender. The headline a common phrase in the German OSM community says just that: Mapping for the render engine.

I’ve been mapping for 3 months now and after finishing all the house numbers in my village POIs and Bus stops where next on my list and I had never been more confused.

highway=bus_stop is widely used to mark the position where passengers await for a bus service […] however there is not complete agreement within the community on this matter, and some users advocate using highway=bus_stop as a node within the highway=* at the place where the vehicle stops.

Great so what now? A 3rd opinion? What about the German Wiki entry:

This use is incompatible with the new public transport schema and should be avoided.

So I started to look further into this and the next stop obviously was public_transport=, which then also lead me to highlights like:

Use public_transport=platform and/or highway=bus_stop to identify the places where passengers wait for the service.

Digging a bit further I found the to this day most informative page on the whole issue…

Proposed features/Public Transport

20th April 2011: 43-3 a overwhelming majority approves of the “new” public_transport= tagging scheme.

After reading through all of that I can say that there is one sentence above I stand 110% behind, the German Wiki:

This use is incompatible with the new public transport schema and should be avoided.

PLEASE support public_transport=

It doesn’t matter if you are mapper or developer. But I especially appeal to all the people responsible for rendering map tiles, because I won’t be able to get people to use public_transport=stop_position if it doesn’t show up on the map. And thanks if you already do!

Right now the “or” basically means add public_transport=stop_position to highway=bus_stop if you like or don’t, but not that you can use either of those with the same result.

The main reason I write this is because I hope more people will support and use the new schema as there have been several post in the German Forum over the last weeks and it was even discussed in the German Podcast 01:09:30 and the only thing consistent in all discussions is inconsistency.

Wipe off highway=bus_stop from the surface of OpenStreetMap!

…that’s my personal opinion. Redirect the Wiki entry to public transport, replace all the tags in the database and remove it from every editor and render engine.

In 22 days it has been 3 years since that proposal was approved…

Btw. if your prefer Reddit’s comment style check out /r/openstreetmap: http://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/comments/21ouxz/public_transport_wipe_off_highwaybus_stop_from/