[Talk-transit] New administrator and comments/questions on the new public transport schema

[Peter Miller]

Just to say that I have just set Stefan Bethke up as an admin. There are now
two administrators, myself and Stefan which is much better.

I would like to also say how impressed I am with the new public transport
schema which is proving to be very useful for modeling the main railway
stations in London. I have also been working on the OSM wiki over the past
week providing more detail about this schema on more pages. Here are a few
pages that I have pretty much finished.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:public_transport%3Dstop_position
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:public_transport%3Dstop_area
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:public_transport%3Dplatform
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:public_transport%3Dstation

One question I do have is about how to tag the boundary of a station. For
some purposes it seems to be important to have a node representing the
station, and a node is also useful because it can be positioned over the
main concourse or at any other appropriate location as opposed to being in
the centre of the boundary which is often in the tracks/platform area. This
begs the question about how to tag the area of the station.

Take Paddington Station in London as an example. Here is the overarching
stop_area for all the elements of public transport associated in some way
with Paddington Station (this including the mainline station, two
underground stations and a bunch of bus stops).
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/204439

Here is the stop area for Paddington mainline station itself (note that
there is a node with role 'station' and the outline of the station with the
role 'building'). Incidentally I am also starting to add footways within the
station to the relation with the role 'access'.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/1562706

Here is the station node. Note the 'note' that reads "DO NOT delete as route
relations cannot have the building (area) as a 'stop'."
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/558489676

And here is the boundary of the station from which I removed the
'railway=station' tag and added a note that reads "please do not add a
railway=station tag - there is already a node performing this function."
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/8877521/history

I am not 100% comfortable with this approach because without a
'railway=station' tag the area is rendered as any other building rather than
as a station. However.. if one adds the 'railway=station' tag to the
building outline then one gets another instance of railway station rendered
on the map. I know that we shouldn't tag to suit the renderer - this is more
a question about how we want to tag things unambiguously and what we want
the map to look like and therefore what we want the rendered to do!



Regards,


Peter Miller
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