Dear all,
there is another proposal, distinct from Polyglot's proposal that is in
RFC since some days:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Drop_stop_positions_and_platforms
Before I tell a personal opinion, I would like to present some related
facts. The basic idea is to look how the tags are actually used.
Taginfo tells us
http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/public_transport
that there are more platform tags than stop_position tags
and both are so many that you cannot reasonably view them all on a map.
About two thirds of elements with public_transport=platform
bear also highway=bus_stop
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/public_transport=platform#combinations
but there are at least more than 100'000 nodes (not ways, not relations,
hence not fully mapped platforms) that are public_transport=platform but
not highway=bus_stop.
These are still too many to reasonably show them on a map (and to not
talk what should happen about them). For you convenience, I have added a
bbox limited request for those that you need to move to your area of
interest:
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/xWI
From my fist impression, most of them are simply not tagged with
highway=bus_stop. However, the first hit in Rome is a tram stop that for
a good reason is not tagged as highway=bus_stop.
It is much less compelling to retag public_transport=stop_position as
highway=bus_stop. Less than one third of them is tagged as
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/public_transport=stop_position#combinations
And here, many belong to railways. Again, a bbox bounded query:
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/xWM
Another matter are definitely wrong public_transport=stop_position,
because they are off any highway, railway, or ferry. There is a
surprsingly large number of them. I have made an area related request
because we need the statistics in a moment:
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/xWF
Running this request for Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands,
Austria, and Switzerland shows that more than half of all global uses of
stop_position are in these six countries (go to "Data", read the first
entry). This is not an arbitrary selection - all these six countries
have about 1000 to 2000 stop_positions per million inhabitants, but for
comparision UK has only 150 stop_positions per inhabitant.
However, the number of failures are significant, between 5% and 10%
(with the exception of Belgium). The uneven distribution suggest that
these relates to specific users, but the total number of users is more
than 500, suggesting that there is a problem to explain the difference
between stop_position and platform.
All in all, I do agree that there is definitely room for the improvement
of public transport mapping. But making the tagging of 500'000 nodes
deprecated and neglecting both problems with that and the more presseing
problems is probably not a good way to go forward. Given that Ilya
refuses for unknown reasons to read this mailing list, please discuss
the matter on the discussion page if he wiki page.
Best regards,
Roland
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