[Tagging] Why are railway=crossing and level_crossing separate tags?

[Martijn van Exel]

Good question. I just noticed that the other day while using the
presets window. I'd say deprecate one of them. I'd be inclined to
deprecate level_crossing because crossing is nice and terse. But
level_crossing is used more (143k vs 22k for railway=crossing) and
railway=crossing causes confusion with highway=crossing which is a
different thing.

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 4:49 PM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> According to the wiki, railway=crossing is "a point where pedestrians may
> cross a railway", while railway=level_crossing is "where a road crosses a
> railway". But footways are also represented by highways, and so if one wants
> to know where pedestrians may cross a railway they can simply look at the
> tags on the intersecting way. So why do we have two separate tags for what
> is essentially the same thing (there are road crossings without gates and
> foot crossings with gates)?
>
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