[Talk-transit] Defining service on railway=tram

Jarek PiĆ³rkowski jarek at piorkowski.ca
Sun Feb 17 17:55:08 UTC 2019


On Sun, 17 Feb 2019 at 10:55, Markus <selfishseahorse at gmail.com> wrote:

> detour seems a bit unsuitable for turn tracks or connections because afaik it implies a longer route, but the tracks i have in mind are rather shortcuts. Maybe deviation doesn't have this meaning?

Right, I withdraw the detour suggestion. Irregular is still best so far I think.

> But don't you also want to include tracks that are only used for drives to the depot? If so, auxiliary/irregular/secondary seems like a better fit anyway.

Tracks that are only used for drives to depot would have service=yard
in my mind.

>> I chose "siding" because I didn't want to invent new tag value, to
>> avoid too big and slow of a change. But maybe we should do it, what do
>> you think?
>
> Imo if a tag or key doesn't fit it's better to invent a new. It would be nice though to hear opinions from other mappers.
>
> Besides, are you sure that siding tracks for trams similar to those for trains don't exist somewhere? If they exist and we use service=siding for auxiliary tracks, there won't be a distinction anymore (or a new tag would have to be invented for real tram siding tracks).

Honestly - I've looked through many of the systems and there isn't
much that functions like a real siding in railway sense. Wiki
describes railway siding as "These tracks are used by slower trains to
be overtaken or to let passengers enter/leave the train if the main
tracks do not have platforms." which doesn't really apply on tram
systems I've seen. The wiki even notes "These tracks might be hard to
differ from the main tracks in some cases." ... if unsure, we could
just leave the tracks with no service.

The closest thing that comes to mind for tram sidings are tracks for
parking or bypassing trams that aren't being used right now, usually
near route termini (e.g. https://osm.org/way/46140380,
https://osm.org/way/69049487). But I've tried to come up with a
description of these that wouldn't also include other tracks not used
in regular service, and was unable to do so. I am leaning towards
deciding it's not really worth drawing the distinction where it's
difficult to actually articulate one. I was able to explain
non-revenue/irregular, yard, and crossover; I don't know if I can
define more categories well.

Regarding input from other mappers, I have also gotten a response from
User:Tigerfell on the wiki at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tag:railway%3Dtram#service.3D.2A_for_tram
- maybe that gives you more ideas.

While we think some more, I might try to look into what the current
tagging is on light rail systems (in the Porto Metro sense, not the
Berlin S-Bahn sense...) to see if it makes sense to include them in a
proposal together with trams, what with trams and light rail forming a
kind of a continuum ("Service classes on street-crossing passenger
rail transport networks"?).

Thanks,
--Jarek



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