[OSM-talk] [tagging] Road crossings proposal - status?

[Andy Allan]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 4:12 PM, Brian Quinion
<openstreetmap at brian.quinion.co.uk> wrote:
> > > I like this - but would suggest a small change:
>  > > highway=crossing
>  > > crossing=zebra|toucan|pelican|...
>  >  No, get rid of the UK specific classifications of crossing completely -
>  > they require too much background knowledge to interpret and are pointless if
>  > you have already split out the various properties into separate tags.
>
>  OK - but this means that even for the simple cases you have to enter 4
>  times as many tags.

Seems sensible to me to have a shorthand. So where you have a type of
crossing that's for cyclists and pedestrians but not horses nor
canoes, and it's controlled by traffic lights (as opposed to not being
controlled at all), we could do with a shorthand way to tag it because
it's really common and typing four or five tags every time is tedious
and lets face it - editors don't support language-neutral presets and
NO AMOUNT OF SUGGESTING THAT THEY SHOULD WILL CHANGE THIS whereas
someone actually doing the coding FIRST might.

Oh, I can think of a way. Yep, I can definitely think of some
shorthand tags for the most common crossing types. Trouble is, as soon
as I mention it, everyone starts uncontrollably ranting.

I tagged a crossing last weekend that was for horses and had traffic
lights and a button to press and all sorts. I thought long and hard
and did oodles of internet-based research, spent some time translating
sentences into and out of Swahili and Klingon (and Ukranian, natch) to
find the perfect way to describe it in every country in a way that
offends nobody, implemented a tagging lookup table and bumped the API
to 0.7, came up with enough clarification tags for the crossing that
it constitutes 0.4% of all the data in the planet *alone*
(...transport:space:vehicles:spaceshuttle=no...), and changed every
editor to hide this additional complexity behind userfriendly, fully
internationalised UIs. Because you can never be too careful when
another level of abstraction could help.

Or maybe I tagged it as crossing=pegasus. I forget.

Cheers,
Andy