[Tagging] Feature proposal - Power transmission refinement - RFC 2

Kytömaa Lauri lauri.kytomaa at aalto.fi
Wed Jul 9 07:44:50 UTC 2014


François Lacombe wrote:

>I spent a little more time this week on the power transmission proposal.
>https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Power_transmission_refinement
> Finally, the two values minor_line and minor_cable, due to the arbitrary voltage threshold which may be different for every contributor, should be replaced by power=line + voltage=* or power=cable + voltage=* to let every consumer to set up its own threshold.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Power_transmission_refinement#overhead_power.3Dline

Calling it "replacement" doesn't mean it's not "deprecation". The proposal is still trying to deprecate power=minor_line, and to remove the simple physical distinction between "really big thing on big pylons" vs. smaller overhead lines that you can often find everywhere.

Mappers can make that size distinction much easier and faster than they could estimate what the actual voltage happens to be; the size is the criteria, not the voltage, even if the size quite often exceeds the threshold after some value in any particular country. And that classification is the most prominent feature for everybody else not interested in the voltages or circuits or number of cables or whatever; in mostly incomplete areas, mappers are most likely to first draw only the "big things", and only then start adding the minor_line's, so it's even easier to use the right choice. Pnorman provided you with nice example pictures for the distinction on the rendering github pages, and gravitystorm explained in detail in another issue in the same tracker why arbitrarily changing established tags is bad for the community. It should be a lesser inconvenience for power infrastructure consumers to select "where (power=line or power=minor_line) and voltage=" etc., than it would be for every other existing map to be cluttered with prominent power lines crisscrossing the suburbs and countryside until all eternity (entering a voltage=* tag can never be enforced on mappers).

-- 
Alv


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