[OSM-talk] Pedestrian crossings and barriers

[Mike Collinson]

At 10:54 AM 29/07/2007, Andy Allan wrote:
>On 7/29/07, Peter Miller <peter.miller at itoworld.com> wrote:
>
>> On the Map Features page there is only a single sort of crossing available:
>> 'highway=crossing'. On the GravityStorm page there is a proposed tag
>> 'crossing=toucan', which makes sense but I don't believe it has been voted
>> on (forgive me if I am wrong).
>>
>> http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/cycle-info/
>
>No, there's been no voting or discussion on this. I find the whole
>voting and map_features arguments tedious in the extreme - and
>personally think that features should be established in the real world
>*before* being considered for inclusion on map_features (this gives
>people a chance to see if their ideas really work, and provide
>real-world examples for the voting process. I don't like theoretical
>discussions about how tags *might* be used).
>
>And since I get to chose the tags that are rendered... ;-)
>
>Doesn't mean I'm not up for discussing it though! I figured
>highway=crossing would be the generic term to cover any-old-crossing
>type, and people who were interested in being more specific could do
>so with crossing=toucan, crossing=zebra and so on. I've only tagged
>crossing=toucan so far, since I wanted them on the cycle routes I've
>been mapping. I don't want to force people to be specific if they
>don't want to be, so highway=crossing would remain the generic term.
Yes, that makes sense.  

My generalisation observation on the various tag debates is that we need both some general one-size fits all tags like waterway=river or waterway=stream which may not be quantitatively/adminstratively/legally precise but well understood and easy to record and render AND then another set for the specialists, like river depth width navigabilility, or in this case specific kinds of  crossing that may be country-specific.

I particularly like the concept of using the value of a general tag as the name of a specialist tag, i.e. highway=crossing, crossing=toucan.  It is easy to understand.  If the danger of a proliferation of tag names is an issue, an alternative would be to keep re-using the class= tag in many situations, e.g.  highway=crossing, class=toucan.

Mike