This is a gist of all the work that was done during the summer of 2019 under Google Summer Of Code (GSOC) to further improve the PT Assistant plugin which assists mappers in mapping Public Transport systems as well as Bicycle and hiking itineraries.

Aim of the Project

To further improve the plugin in a way that it helps mappers in mapping public transport systems as well as Bicycle itineraries with ease and a lot of further changes to make the plugin more helpful and flexible to the mapper. The assistant became more user-friendly and should act as a true assistant with smarter decision-making capabilities.

End Results

The plugin is now much more capable, processing the data in the background and presenting the result to enable the mappers to make decisions especially with new features like routing helper for bicycle, the extended data model for public transport, and some new key functions in old routing helper. All the major achievements of this summer have been listed below :

Extending routing helper for bicycles

Previous Routing Helper was dedicated to public transport so my task was to extend it further for Bicycles. As Bicycle follows the original mapping model for route relations, they are different than the route relations for public transport. Bicycle routes contain “forward” and backward roles on its ways to separate branches were traversing the route in one direction differs from the route in the opposite direction. The order of the member ways is different than pt-routes. So the basic idea of the router was the same first it starts from the beginning of the route and checks for gaps in the route and at every step, it checks for the validity of the current traversing way and if it finds something wrong it shows users options to fix that.

… See full entry

As I was working on improving the visualization of route relations I had to improve the data part of the public transport. now one can get the nearest way to a bus stop and all stops a way is serving. stop can be identified as left or right side according to the direction of the way it is serving. these features of the data will help in making the edges in route relation which will be my next task. By using these it has also improved the sorting of pt_route members including the stop which was not working properly before(was creating the duplication of stops when it was passing through a two-way road).

In pt-assistant my next task is to improve the visualization. as route relations make a spider-like structure so visualization of relations becomes too tough. So the task is to break the route relations into segments where each segment serves a bunch of relations and will be a collection of ways which are serving the same bunch of common relations. for complete details, you can look TaskManager

Regarding this summer’s project, for the first period, the main focus will be implementing Bicycle Routing Helper .this will help the user to route bicycle routes and help them fixing the routes according to the bicycle traffic rules. In past routing helper was available for helping to fix the routes related to Public transport and It will be very helpful for mappers to have the bicycle routing helper as well. after completing this there are many changes we have to make in pt-assistant in other areas such as subroute creations, left-right traffic detection, etc. I have started my work and its progress you can see in TaskManager Gsoc .