[OSM-talk] [RFC] Deprecating the use of Tag:highway=stop in favour of Key:stop

[James Livingston]

On 26/08/2009, at 1:38 PM, John Smith wrote:
> I agree, we need more tags to describe the railway crossing's  
> feature set, boom_gate=no, lights=no etc, however this is a special  
> case for stop signs because they will exist either side of the  
> junction and never applies to the railway line. Unlike junctions of  
> road traffic which needs to be differentiated from the way.

This brings up an interesting question, when you're "finding the  
nearest junction" to use for stop key on a node, what counts as a  
junction? It's going to be a node which belongs to the current way and  
at least one other way satisfying certain conditions, but what are  
those conditions? If we are to use the stop key, I think those  
conditions will need to be explicitly spelt out, so that you can  
process the data.

One obvious possibility would be ways that have highway=* tags -  
should footway/cycleway/path crossing count as junctions?


If we're going to automagically determine which junction the Stop  
applies to, why do we even need a new key with yes/both/-1 values?  
Surely we could just say that if the existing highway=stop tag is  
applied to a node belonging to a single way (and not an intersection,  
which has the current meaning), then the Stop applies to traffic on  
the current way approaching the closest junction.