[Talk-us] Problems with Tiger railroad data

[Alex Mauer]

Peter Miller wrote:
> Also of note in the first example are the two parallel railway lines coming
> from SSE (one a spur and one a rail that are visible in Potlatch in edit
> more). Further to the east there are three tracks running parallel, all
> railway=rail. From the aerial photography there appears to be only one
> railway line (although there may be twin tracks close together but there
> certainly aren't two lines that far apart). I have seen this before and
> deleted the parallel one but was not sure if I was doing the rights thing. 

Probably not.  Railroad tends to be very hard to see from aerial
photography, and TIGER railroad data has been very good, in my
experience much better than the regular road data.

> I
> don't see any OSM tag to identify the number of parallel tracks which would
> be useful rather that running twin tracks very close, or indeed running four
> tracks parallel to each other but possibly this has been discussed in the
> past.

I think we should leave merging of parallel tracks up to the renderer,
rather than removing them from the data.  IMO the data should reflect
what's on the ground.

-Alex Mauer "hawke"