[Talk-transit] Railway route relations

[Jochen Topf]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 01:31:10AM +0200, Cartinus wrote:
> On Monday 10 August 2009 09:10:15 Jochen Topf wrote:
> > The "infrastructure route" is something different from the "moving vehicles
> > forming a route". They are two different concepts, so they deserve their
> > own keys. A bicycle route or walking route is more like an "infrastructure
> > route", there are signs on the way. Its a physically existing thing. The
> > "moving vehicle route" (which we called a line) is more "ephemeral".
> 
> To me signs have nothing to do with infrastructure. For me the infrastructure 
> are the roads themselves. So to me a cycleroute is a moving vehicle route.
> 
> From this follows that introducing "line" relations is not consistent at all, 
> because then we have a different type of relation for public transport moving 
> vehicle routes and private transport moving vehicle routes.

Of course its not about the signs themselves, they just help identify the
infrastructure.

I'll try to explain my point differently: There is infrastructure in the form
of roads and paths. Some of them have names or numbers, often overlapping, such
as the "School Rd" or "M5" or "B 57" or "Thames Cylce Path". People (optionally
in their vehicles) use this infrastructure to move about. Sometimes they use
one part of the infrastructure, sometimes another part. For most journeys
they will use several of those named/numbered routes. So I might take my bike
out for a spin first along some local roads (Foo Rd, Bar Rd, ...), a larger
Road (B 567) and then along smaller roads again which happen to be part of
the Baz Cycle Route etc.

Public transport lines are different. They are not part of this infrastructure,
they us it just like I use this infrastructure when out cycling. But there is a
difference to my cycling: They always use the same parts of the infrastructure
on each journey.

Unlike my way to work (which is the same each day, too), these public transport
journeys are important to many people. Thats why we want to put them into OSM.

I totally agree that this is only one way of thinking about these difference
and as always the world is much more complicated. But I happen to think this
to be a very obvious and logical classification. Others might see it
differently.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298