Sometimes you'll see journey plan results that aren't what you'd expect. This can be caused by a huge number of different factors, which means working out where the problem lies can at first seem quite complex.
We use data from a number of different sources to power our journey planning engine, including open data sources like Open Street Map (OSM). OSM is an open data source that is editable by anyone who signs up for an account.
With so many contributors to OSM, it's possible to see inconsistencies in the way things are named and tagged.
For example, there's at least one very prolific contributor on the Isle of Wight whose practices are a bit different to what we see elsewhere, and our journey planner just doesn't recognise how they edit things as being routable for a bus. These errors propose too many individual changes to be corrected and even if we did make the correction changes to suit a journey plan, the OSM contributor has the license to reverse the changes and "correct" them back again at some point.
We have an automated pipeline for OSM data that takes the UK-wide OSM data, splits it up into smaller files, and then applies certain steps to that data. We identify anything tagged in that way and rewrite the tags to what we would have expected. That means we get what we want and we don't have to battle against people editing OSM.
Often you can manage data updates yourself via OSM, which will be automatically imported by Passenger Cloud every day at 10 am.
There are certain things that you can resolve yourself very easily - like if a place isn't where it should be; or there's a vacant shop where a business has moved in; anything black and white, obviously incorrect or correct.
Access to roads, places, etc. is very complicated though, and probably discouraging for you to change something and then possibly not see any change the following day. This is also dependent on other contributors editing roads, carriageways and street access based on temporary changes such as road closure due to roadworks.
For help and assistance with OSM please contact help@passengerteam.com and our Customer Success team would be happy to help