[Talk-transit] Tagging of railway station

[Roland Olbricht]

Hi,

> 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)

I strongly opt for (i). As you have mentioned, for both the exact placment is 
subjective. But the single node is far easier to understand and handle for 
mappers.

For example, you could tell a mapper that the node is the location where label 
is placed. By contrast, to start a mapper's introduction with a lengthy 
explanation of the computation of a centroid is not practical.

If you want a really precise station description, I would go towards indoor 
mapping, see
http://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Indoor_Mapping
In-station navigation could be a strength of OSM if enough stations are 
mapped.

> 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 ?

Yes, remove it from the wiki. A lot of stations even don't have a building.

> 2. Use of public_transport=station
> This is a much debated point:
[...]
> (ii) public_transport=station should be added to the one object that is
> tagged railway=station, since these tags are synonymous
[...]
> Same question: is there one of these four approaches that should be favoured
> ?

Clearly (ii) is the best choice. Even the public transport proposal states 
that the tags should be used alongside the existing tags. In general, a mapper 
and also a tool would usually just left aside unknown tags, so (ii) keeps 
tools working regarless on what tagging they depend.

Having two distinct objects would be difficult to understand, because which 
object you get will then depend on the tools syntax (either one of them or 
both), and nobody expects a second difficult-to-find shadow object to exist.

Cheers,

Roland