Apologies for joining the discussion slightly late, I was offline
yesterday.
For transparency, I shall first state that my company Carto'Cité has a
contract with SNCF to "look after" 380 railway stations in the Greater
Paris area. This is how I detected Ilya's changeset
(http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/53267689) and started a
discussion with him. We've also mapped the main Paris railway stations
to great details, the result of which can be seen using tools such as
http://openlevelup.net/ and https://openstationmap.org/.
There are a few points in this discussion I'd like to come back to.
The argument that only a few stations have been mapped with polygons is
wrong. The OSM practice is to start simple and rough then iterate to
improve the data and accuracy. The fact that only a few people have done
it so far is not an argument either : probably only a few people started
mapping the electrical network and this is now a valuable asset. Or we
decide collectively that there is a threshold of complexity that we do
not want to cross.
I don't see why subway stations should be mapped differently to other
overground stations. Both are part of the public transport model which
should handle all situations (and evolve if needed). Mapping underground
areas is indeed harder, but not impossible. The indoor model can be
combined with the public transport model and we proved it works.
I agree that these massive stop_area relations are not elegant. These
have indeed been used to make it easier to extract the data related to a
station. However in complex cases I cannot see an alternative, maybe
using site relations with a sensible use of perimeter members is the way
to go. Having said that, removing bike sharing facilities, taxi and
other useful stuff from stop_area relations is a strange decision - and
by the way this seems to have been done to make it easier for another
tool to use the data. Let's not start an editing war...
A lot of intensive work has been done to map railway stations with the
indoor scheme, and large sections of them are located underground. This
is for instance the case in France where SNCF has put some effort and
money in doing so, and also Deusche Bahn in Germany. I was indeed rather
surprised that Ilya went ahead with changing the data based on his
proposal before it got voted. I am glad this discussion goes public.
Cheers,
Antoine.
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