[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Crossing cleanup and deprecation

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> On 28 Nov 2022, at 23:53, Minh Nguyen <minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us> wrote:
> 
> If we keep crossing=zebra around based on the argument [1] that it takes fewer keystrokes or clicks than adding crossing_ref=zebra or crossing:markings=zebra without using a preset, then this undermines the arguments against railway=tram_crossing, railway=tram_level_crossing, and probably some other contentious, de facto tags that are essentially shortcuts for tagging combinations without additional semantic value.


crossing:markings is just about this, road markings, and while crossing_ref=zebra wasn’t documented for a long time, people that added it around here told me it was about the presence of road markings as well.

Crossing=zebra is about a zebra crossing, it implies also vertical signs- in some jurisdictions and some conditions at least - and it implies that there aren’t traffic signals. 
Neither crossing:markings nor crossing_ref (as it is applied here) say anything about traffic signals. Here you will usually have zebra markings on signal controlled crossings, but they aren’t zebra crossings of course, still crossing:markings=zebra applies. And many of them have the crossing_ref=zebra tag (I ignore this tag, it does not follow any consistent logics here, definitely not a tag I would want to base navigation decisions on). Maybe they are when the signals don’t work (not sure about it, the law here requires vertical signs for zebra crossings, unless at road intersections).