Clay Smalley <[email protected]> writes: > Over the last few months, I've been doing some systematic improvements to > the passenger railway network across North America. Much of this has been > filling out public_transport=stop_area relations for every railway station, > including stop positions and platforms, as well as verifying the geometry > of the underlying railways and classifying them (usage=*, service=*). My > goal here is to prepare the map such that route relations can be more > meaningful and accurately describe which track each train uses. > > In the course of doing this, I got a tap on the shoulder [1] and found out > I was using a definition of railway=halt that may not match up with what > people were expecting. As far as I know now, railway=station was originally > intended for stations where trains are always scheduled to stop, and > railway=halt for flag stops (aka request stops). In the German OSM > community, there was a decision made for railway=halt to be used on > stations that are missing switches, which means trains cannot switch > tracks, terminate or reverse direction there—a distinction more relevant to > railway operations and scheduling. Naturally, there are quite a lot more of > these than flag stops. > > I'm in a predicament here. So far, I've mapped all Amtrak stations and > various commuter rail stations across the Northeast according to the > no-switches definition of halt. I'm happy to revert these back to stations > (wherever they aren't flag stops), though I'd like to hear others' thoughts > before going through with that.
I find the notion that "no switches -> halt" notion bizarre and brand new. So I would very much be in favor of you going back to what I consider a normal definition. I'd say that's railyway=halt if there are *no* scheduled stops. Around me, the commuter rail has mostly what I'd calls stations: fixed infrastructure for trains and scheduled stops. There are a few places that are called "flag stops", but that really means: train stops if a passenger on the train asks, or if people are visible on the platform but typically such places have some trains alwys stop and some treat them as flag stops. So I think they ar railway=station. I would say if people want to tag absence of switches/etc. that should be some train-nerd extra key. This is not relevant to people or routers using the data. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
