[Talk-us] USA Rail: Calling all OSM railfans! (especially in California)

[Peter Dobratz]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 10:31 AM, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:

> Portland also needs help.  Seems whenever the map gets fixed, someone goes
> through and stomps the name back to something incorrect like "Metropolitan
> Area Express" or "Portland Streetcar" instead of the subdivision name, and
> pull things like putting the line of the service running on the tracks as
> ref=*.   God help you if you actually try to point it out, Grant Humphries
> or Peter Dobratz will get bitchy about it...
>

For those following along from home, please see the following note in
Portland, Oregon:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/note/335545

As you can see, I closed out this note (twice).  The issues in this note
are too vague and refers to the whole Portland metropolitan area.  Also,
the actual area where this note is located is a new section of track which
is not scheduled to be operational until September 2015.  There are a bunch
of things in this immediate area with construction or proposed tags since
the area is still very much in flux.

There was a similar situation which I resolved a few months ago.  Paul put
some OSM notes in downtown Portland saying he objects to the use of
oneway=yes tags on OSM Ways for Portland area light rail and street car
lines.  I looked into the history and determined that there were a few
cases where Grant Humphries had added the oneway=yes tag and Paul had came
back later and removed the oneway=yes tag, only to have Grant Humphries add
the oneway=yes tag in a subsequent edit.  I sent OSM private messages to
both Grant and Paul in December.  Paul never responded to my OSM private
message on this subject.  However, I did have a productive conversation
with Grant.  Grant was not even aware that he had been undoing some of
Paul's edits. In any case, we came to the agreement that oneway=yes does
not make sense for Portland area railways and I removed the tag as part of
my effort to update the route relations to use the new route_master format
with a separate route relation for each direction of travel.  For what it's
worth, there are actually signs on the ground that tell pedestrians to look
both ways before crossing these train tracks and the new route relations
implicitly include the standard direction of travel along the railway
because the rail segments are added to the relation in the other they are
traversed.

However, in the case of the above note, I can't discern exactly which tags
Paul is objecting to, nor can I find any specific information on the OSM
wiki about exactly what should be in the name tag on railways.  In the
note, Paul says "It's not rocket surgery to create the relations and have
things named like "Banfield Mainline" like it's supposed to be instead of
"Metropolitan Area Express", which is wrong."  I have no idea what Paul is
talking about here.  The phrase "Banfield Mainline" does not occur in the
OSM wiki, and I can't find anything on the internet to indicate exactly
what tracks would be best referred to as the "Bainfield Mainline."  I moved
to Portland about 9 months ago, I often hear these tracks colloquially
referred to as the "MAX", which is an acronym for "Metropolitan Area
Express."  Or maybe "MAX" just refers to the name of the trains that run on
those tracks.

I do not have any objections to updates to Portland area railways to be
more correct/complete and/or consistent with the work SteveA is doing in
California.  For anyone doing these edits, it would be helpful to check the
OSM history on the affected Ways and communicate with anyone who has also
changed the tags that you would be changing.  Maybe even start with an
Oregon equivalent of the http://wiki.osm.org/wiki/California/Railroads wiki
page.  A bunch of the route relations for the Portland area are already
linked from http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Portland,_Oregon.

Peter
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