[Talk-transit] Tagging of railway station

[Copro Grammes]

Hi,

I'm a French mapper involved in railways mapping. I try to define a consensus way for tagging railway stations, since some French mappers recently argued aboutdifferent approachs (and since sometimes the wiki lacks of consistency or precision)


1. Position of tag railway=station
There are currently two approaches [1]:
(i) on a node within the main concourse area
(ii) on an area encompassing the land used for passenger services (including any concourse, platforms and associated tracks)

The first approach was said by the wiki to be preferred, since it provides the most helpful information for people using the station (whereas with the second approch, the name of station  will be positioned in the centroid for the area, which is often within the platform area).
Conversely some mappers say that a polygon contains more information than a node (which moreover is seen as arbitrarily placed on larger stations). Therefore they advocate the 'node approach' should only be used for simple stations.


I'd like to know if one of these approaches is widely preferred by mappers, so that it could be defined as a standard way of mapping stations.

N.B. A third approach is presented on the wiki [2]: tagging the building. This approach seems not appropriate, since the bulding(s) often doesn't cover the whole station surface (e.g. platform area). Maybe it could be removed frome the wiki ?



2. Use of public_transport=station
This is a much debated point:
(i) some mappers think it should not be used on a station which is tagged with railway=station. For a station, either you use conventionnal tags (railway=station), either you use public_transport=station

(ii) public_transport=station should be added to the one object that is tagged railway=station, since these tags are synonymous
(iii) it could be added to another object than the one which is tagged railway=station.
E.g. the surface of the railway station is tagged public_transport=station, while a node railway=station is created within the main concourse area.
(iv) for larger stations the whole surface containing a railway station, a bus station, a tram stop, etc. is tagged public_transport=station.


Same question: is there one of these four approaches that should be favoured ?

Cheers,
Zigeuner

[1] See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:railway%3Dstation#How_to_map
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Railway_stations#Building
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-transit/attachments/20131207/1efd96e2/attachment.html>