[Tagging] Substation proposal approved - and a suggestion for a post-vote change

Ole Nielsen / osm on-osm at xs4all.nl
Sat Oct 12 07:05:35 UTC 2013


The substation refinement proposal has been approved by a large majority
of voters. The new feature page can be found here
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:power%3Dsubstation

Afterwards I regret a bit that I didn't reserve a dedicated value in the
substation=* tag for the small street level substations (Trafohäuschen in
German). I used the IEC definitions that suggest that anything below 100
kV or so should be considered 'distribution'. It may have been better to
define this value only to cover the last level of transformation from
medium voltage to low voltage supplied to household customers. This would
address the concerns of some mappers, especially in central Europe, that
used the old "station" vs "sub_station" to distinguish this.

I propose to change the meaning of "substation=distribution" to be used
only on substations at the last level of voltage transforming, thus the
small street-level transformer kiosks etc supplied with medium voltage
(typically 10-30 kV) and delivering low voltage power to households and
small businesses. A small substation would then be tagged as
power=substation and substation=distribution. Mappers could then
unambiguously tag such facilities without having to know the actual
voltage(s) employed in a given area. Tagging the voltage is still
recommended, though.

I would like to have opinions on this. If this change is made some
substations at the 'second level' such as 60/10 kV now tagged as
'distribution' should have this tag removed. The current suggestion that
small kiosk substations may be tagged as 'power=transformer' will then be
removed to avoid any confusion. Only pole mounted transformers will keep
their own tagging scheme (power=pole, transformer=yes/distribution).

Ole N






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