[Talk-transit] Public transport workshop in Germany

[Gerrit Lammert]

Hi Jochen.

Jochen Topf wrote:
> The weekend before last we had a workshop in Karlsruhe, Germany on the
> topic of public transport in OSM. The idea was to bring interested
> people together to improve the modelling of public transport
> infrastructure and networks in OSM.
>
> The results have now been documented. See
> http://blog.geofabrik.de/?p=23 for details.

That is great. I did some work in this area by working out the
unified_stoparea proposal some months ago.
I am really happy there finally seems to be some progress in this area. :)

Here are some notes I have after reading (the German version of) your
wiki page.
I'm writing this before I read responses to this thread, to not get
confused. I hope this won't be obsoleted by what others wrote...

- the "usage" tag (and similar tags)
Here I would prefer to use hierarchical tagging, so instead of
  railway=rail; usage=branch
I would rather write
  railway=rail:branch

- ref/name tags
If you intend this to be filled with information like
ref="Line" 10 or
name="Main station - zoo"
I would rather see this information with the appropriate
route-relations. Things like
name="Ringleis"
which name the actual rail corpus and not the train traveling upon it,
are fine with me.

- "Stadtschnellbahnen" (German)
It confuses me, that these only consist of subway and monorail. I think
the term may cause some confusion. I do not think it is necessary to
combine these two and form a group for them.

-separate geometry with tram
I disagree that this is a good idea. Most attributes belong to both (the
road and the tracks within the road). Together they form one entity.
Attributes that do not belong to both should use hierarchical tagging
scheme, e.g.:
  railway=tram:disused
  railway:gauge=100
  railway:operator=railcompany
  highway:operator=citymanagement

-concerning the tagging of transport stops.
Please have a look at my proposal regarding this:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/unified_stoparea
it is very similar to what you propose and is already used by quite some
mappers throughout Europe.
Please try to build upon it, as you are basically defining something
very similar with new tag names.
I am not sure if it would be necessary or wise to have everything under
the "public_transport" name space as you propose

All in all, I am very happy with this scheme, foremost that someone
cares about this. :)
I am not sure if the scheme is not to complicated for the casual
not-so-concerned mapper. That is why I was trying to change as little as
possible with my proposal and allow a wide range of detail levels.
The irony is, that I personally rather prefer a complex and complete
model to the change-as-little-as-possible approach I finally proposed
(I'm German after all ;-)
I am eager to see, how your proposal is received by the crowd!

Greetings,

Gerrit