[OSM-talk] All the subway systems in the world

[Roland Olbricht]

Hi,

I strongly suggest to oppose the proposal. To do so, you need to add

{{vote|no}} --[[User:<Username>|<Name or username>]] date

under the headline == Voting == once voting is opened. Said in short:
Adding more contradictions and confusion in public transport mapping 
makes a too complex topic worse in terms of complexity.

In detail, there is a whole bunch of reasons

- The proposal conflicts with well-established mapping rules. The tag
   "layer" is explicitly not to use on railway stations, as
   https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:layer tells:

       "Ways in buildings (or similar structures like multilevel parking
        lots, shopping centers, airports, railway stations, some
        multilevel bridges and roads...) should be mostly described with
        level=* instead of layer."

- The proposal conflicts with reality. It requires a tag "colour" on
   lines, but not all lines have a defined colour. Making colour required
   may lead mappers to add fictitious information.

   Other examples where the proposal is at odds with reality is that most
   subway platforms in the world are on level -2, some on -3. Also,
   stop positions are not necessarily meaningful on networks with varying
   train lengths.

- There are already a couple of established mapping instructions, namely
   https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Simple_Indoor_Tagging
   https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport
   with details like
     https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:public_transport%3Dplatform
   https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRailwayMap/Tagging
   https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStationMap#Level_of_Details

   Hence, yet another standard makes things more complicated.

- The author actively avoids discussion:

   The proposal has been announced much later (2017-09-30) than it was
   opened (2017-09-23). It has not been announced at all on the relevant
   mailing list (talk-transit).

   Even on comments on the wiki discussion page, only part of them have
   been adressed.

All in all I suggest to retract the proposal and rather write a simple 
set of instructions based on the existing wiki pages, with the errors in 
this proposal then fixed.

I still do think that Ilya has good intent, and probably the intent was 
to have a documentation what maps.me and/or the "validator" recognizes. 
But making a wiki proposal is the wrong way to do so, in particular 
given that the software still has the mentioned flaws.

Best regards,

Roland