[talk-au] How are we going to do trams?

Lachlan Rogers lachlan at rogers.name
Tue Sep 4 03:53:25 BST 2007


On 9/4/07, Neil Penman <ianaf4you at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I couldn't find any comparable situations in Karlsruhe. Although I didn't
> look too hard.  They seem to, quite sensibly, keep their trams separate from
> other road users.  All the examples I found were on dedicated ways tagged as
> light rail.  Can anyone find a specific good example?

There are some fairly comparable examples, but they are not visible on
the Mapnik layer.  Viewing Karlsruhe with the Osmarender (Tiles at Home)
layer shows up light railways down the centre of some roads and
pedestrian ways.

This permalink should take you there:
http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=49.00862136643506&lon=8.401431292721304&zoom=16&layers=0BF

Loading the region in JOSM shows that some of the tram ways have been
created by re-using the road segments and creating a new way of type
light-rail.  This renders quite well in Osmarender, but having
multiple ways sharing segments can sometimes lead to tricky editing (I
regularly do it for areas).

I would suggest using railway=light_rail for trams in Melbourne in the
following way:

> Trams in the middle of normal, undivided roads
Do this, where necessary, by re-using the road segments to create
another way tagged as railway=light_rail.

> Trams on their own routes (eg. past the zoo..?)
Easy.  Use new segments to create a way tagged as railway=light_rail.

> Trams with their own track in a median strip
As I understand it, this would essentially be a dual carriageway if
there was no tramline.  Simply map it like an ordinary dual
carriageway (separate ways for each direction), and then create a
third way down the middle that can be railway=light_rail.  My guess is
that this would be the way to do most of the roads in Melbourne that
have tramlines.

> Route number labelling
The "ref" tag should be able to handle this.  Perhaps we will need to
extend the recently developed Australian reference tagging scheme
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Australian_Roads_Tagging#Reference_Tagging).

> Stop labelling and numbering
Existing tags cover this:
railway=halt
name=TRAM_STOP_NAME
We could also use a ref= tag to number the tram stops if this would help.

All of these suggestions make use of existing tags, and seem to make sense.

Thats my 2 cents worth, anyway.

- Lachlan




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