Manual / Diversions

Driver instructions and the bulletin

The bulletin is the page a driver reads at the wheel. A routing engine produces a turn-by-turn narrative; a driver needs something else, and this is where the difference is made — by generating the turns, then editing them.

What you are looking at

In the planning workspace, the right-hand column is headed Driver instructions, "the steps, their markers, and what the document will say". On a record you are only reading, the same pane appears under the map and says so:

This is the page a driver receives. The steps, their wording and their markers are written in the editor — press Edit the plan… on the map above.

While editing, a bar across the top of the pane carries Generate from the drawn path (Regenerate, once there is a bulletin), Add a step, and a line reminding you that "Turn-by-turn comes from the routing engine. Your wording, your notes and steps you added are kept."

Below it, the step list. Then the save controls: Save the bulletin (which reads Saved until something changes) and Discard changes. Then Edit as plain text, folded away. Then On the document — the bulletin as the printed page will render it.

What the app adds to what the engine said

A generated bulletin is not the engine's narrative. Four things are added, because the engine cannot know them:

• where the bus leaves, named by the last stop it still serves — a driver can see a stop; they cannot see a distance along a route line;
• which stops are not served, by name and count. This is the part passengers experience and the part you will be asked about;
• where it rejoins, likewise by stop;
• what to do about time. Every bulletin ends with an OBSERVE SCHEDULED TIME block naming the next point where the timetable actually specifies a time. A shorter path runs early, and running early is a punctuality failure the same as running late. Where no such point can be worked out, the block still prints, worded generally — it is never left off.

And it takes things away: the engine's steps for a road that merely bends are dropped. A driver already on the road does not need to be told to keep going; they need to be told where to turn.

The step list

One row per step, numbered the way a driver counts through them — 1, 2, 2.1, 3. Each row carries the instruction (editable in place), the distance to the next turn, and small tags: yours on a step you wrote, edited where you have rewritten what the engine said, and map where a picture of that turn will print.

Only your own steps can be moved, and that is not a limitation. Read in order, the engine's turns are the path: a bulletin whose turns are in a different order is not an edited bulletin, it is a different route, and a driver following it at the wrong intersections is the failure this prevents. The controls are simply not drawn on those rows, and where a move would take one of your steps out of the group it belongs to, the arrow is disabled rather than doing something you did not ask for.

A step that has grown very long says so under itself — "a step this long is usually two steps" — past a threshold, and only past it.

Markers on the map

Steps the engine produced already know where they are, and their numbers appear on the map. A step you wrote does not, so the Markers on the map panel lists what is outstanding and gives each one a Place button: press it, then click the map.

Leaving one unplaced is allowed — the panel says so, and the bulletin prints either way. A sub-step never wants a marker: it elaborates the turn above it rather than being a place of its own.

Regenerating, and what survives it

Regenerate from the drawn path re-asks the routing engine after you have moved an anchor or a via, and it does not throw your work away. The app merges what you had onto the fresh turns and then tells you what happened:

Regenerated: kept 4 edits of yours; could not place 1 — check it.

Three kinds of work are carried across: wording you rewrote, notes you added, and steps you wrote yourself. Anything that cannot be matched to a turn on the new path is reported as Could not be placed on the new path, with the text and the reason, rather than being attached to whatever turn happens to be nearest — a note that has lost its turn is a question for a person.

One thing never survives: the position you nudged a step's number to on the map. A regeneration is exactly the moment that turn may have moved somewhere else entirely, and keeping the nudge would pin a number to a spot the path no longer passes. A marker you placed — where you said a real thing is — is kept.

Writing it as plain text instead

Edit as plain text is an escape hatch, and the panel is blunt about the trade:

Saving here replaces the steps above — the text becomes what the document renders, and the step list is cleared. Saving it back unchanged keeps the steps.

Use it when a bulletin is quicker to type than to assemble. Once saved as text, the structured steps — and with them the per-turn pictures and the distances — are gone until you generate again.

The preview

On the document is not an impression of the printed page; it is rendered by the same code the PDF uses, letterhead, standing notice, map insets and all. While you have unsaved edits it is labelled unsaved changes shown, so what you are looking at is what an approval would freeze.

What the numbers mean

What they do not mean

A distance is an estimate of the drawn path, not of the road as driven. It prints with a leading ~ for that reason.

A per-step drive time is the least trustworthy figure the bulletin can carry, which is why printing them is off by default: the engine models free-flowing traffic with no time at stops at all. Switching them on puts a number on a page a driver reads as a running time, and it is not one.

The timing block is not a figure at all. It is a safety instruction, and no layout setting can drop it.

Missing nothing is stated, not omitted. Where a diversion misses no stops at all, the bulletin prints "Stops not served: none — every stop on this section is still served." rather than leaving the section out. Absence of a section is not information a driver can rely on.

A bulletin with no turns is not a bulletin with no content. Without a routing engine the app still produces the leave stop, the rejoin stop, the missed stops, the kilometres skipped and the timing block, and says plainly that the turn-by-turn was not generated. The bar says "No routing engine — the draft will have everything except the turns."

Instructions are part of what approval signs off. They can only be written while the record is a draft. On anything past that the pane says so, and the save controls are not drawn.

When it looks wrong

Regenerate reports that it could not reach the engine. Nothing is overwritten: the record keeps the bulletin it had. An engine that could not answer is not "this path has no turns", and collapsing those two would let one outage plus one click replace an annotated bulletin with an empty one.

Regenerating produces a bulletin for the wrong path. It should not: the drawn path is saved first, so the turns describe what is on the map. If the turns describe a street you moved away from, save the plan and generate again, and say so to whoever maintains this app.

The numbers on the map and in the list disagree. They cannot, by design — both come from one authority. If you ever see it, that is worth reporting; a map that says 3 where the list says 4 sends a driver to the wrong intersection.

A step you added has no number on the map. It has no marker yet. The Markers on the map panel lists exactly which ones.