[OSM-talk] Escalators and Travalators

[Tobias Knerr]

Stephen Hope wrote:
> 2009/8/23 Tobias Knerr <osm at tobias-knerr.de>:
>> I believe the best way to solve this is to create a new top-level (that
>> is, highway) value for all variants of conveyor transport.
> [...]
> Is this intended to be only for human transport?  I know of some quite
> lengthy conveyors for goods - eg coal, grain etc. There's two main
> types, belt and screw, and I've seen a mix of both. Escalators and
> travelators are both belt conveyors.  I don't know if we want to try
> and differentiate for goods use, or just lump them together under
> something like "conveyor=goods, type = grain/coal/gravel/etc".  We
> certainly want to make it easy for routing programs to differentiate
> between goods and human ones.

Using the same top level tag (e.g. highway=conveyor) would only make
sense if applications could use both the same way, and I don't believe
there are apps that can. Routers don't need conveyors for goods for
their calculations, and a rendered map displaying it like a pedestrian
conveyor transport would certainly irritate users. So using the same tag
would only result in making evaluating (and tagging) the conveyor=* tag
required.

Therefore, I'd prefer to restrict highway=conveyor to human transport
(or human+bicycle or some kind of vehicle, if this exists somewhere, by
using access tags) and use a separate top level tag for goods - for
example man_made=conveyor.

Maybe it would be better to use different values, too, such as
goods_conveyor vs. "human_conveyor"*?

Tobias Knerr

* I'm not sure whether this is a name at all, maybe someone is more
creative...