[Talk-GB] Channel Tunnel Routing

Craig Wallace craigw84 at fastmail.fm
Sat Sep 8 11:15:13 BST 2012


On 07/09/2012 21:03, Philip Barnes wrote:
> A while ago I had a burst of ferry and Channel Tunnel routing, I had
> successfully got routing through the Channel Tunnel working, although
> some tracing needed to be done with the French Terminal, however it
> worked in OSRM.
>
> I had tagged the lines through the tunnel as route=ferry, however these
> tags have now been deleted in changeset
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/12858462 with the comment
> "Channel Tunnel is not a ferry". The result being routing through the
> tunnel no longer works.
>
> I accept the tunnel isn't a ferry, but I would have considered it a rail
> ferry. Before I start an edit war, is there a better way to tag a rail
> ferry, that works with routing, than the way I did it?
>
> Have not yet contacted the mapper.

I assume you are referring to the Eurotunnel "Le Shuttle" motorail 
service? And not any of the other train services which operate through 
the tunnel (eg Eurostar).
And I assume you are referring to routing by car (which seems to be all 
that OSRM does).

I'd agree that Le Shuttle is not a ferry, so should not be tagged as 
route=ferry. It is a train route, so should be tagged as route=train. 
Preferably with a route relation, not tagging all of the individual 
ways, as there is a variety of different train routes through the 
tunnel. Note there is already a route relation for Eurostar.

In terms of routing by car, you also need some way of specifying that it 
is a motorail service. I don't know if there is any standard tagging for 
this, or if any other similar services are mapped (I know there aren't 
any others left in the UK)?
The obvious tagging would be something like route=train, 
motor_vehicle=yes, bicycle=yes, foot=no etc. Or maybe a specific 
"motorail" tag would be useful?
Though this is probably not supported by an routing software (yet).

Craig



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