Changeset: 77959450
changing unstaffed Amtrak stations to railway=halt
Closed by clay_c
Tags
created_by | JOSM/1.5 (15553 en) |
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Discussion
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Comment from SomeoneElse
Hello clay_c,
Is there a definition of railway-halt for the US that you're using anywhere? https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:railway=halt just says that this "might differ from country to country"; if there was a shared definition in use anywhere it'd be good to have it to link to. I'm just asking here because at the DWG we were asked about it, and this changeset changes a number of places to halts.
Best Regards,
Andy (from OSM's Data Working Group) -
Comment from clay_c
Hi Andy,
I'm using the definition of a railway station without switches or crossovers, as in the German examples on the wiki. Unstaffed-ness happened to be a convenient heuristic to find such stations. I visually checked each one to see if there were switches nearby or not.
Best,
Clay -
Comment from SomeoneElse
Thanks. Is that definition widely used in the US as well as in Germany-speaking countries? As far as I can tell it isn't in the UK, for example.
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Comment from Minh Nguyen
That definition isn’t generally used in the U.S. railway=halt is used for flag stops. Some unstaffed Amtrak stations are flag stops, but for instance the Oakland-Coliseum/Airport station (OAC) is a fixed stop, about as built up as most stations along commuter rail lines. An extreme example is Cincinnati Union Terminal (CIN), one of the largest station buildings in the country, now tagged as a halt because Amtrak replaced the ticket counter with a vending machine during a recent round of layoffs.
(What’s more, some tram systems as a rule only stop when flagged, but we’re still tagging all the stations as stations rather than tram stops, because Americans don’t expect rail passenger facilities to be as built up as in Europe.)
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Comment from clay_c
I don't think people generally understand the distinction between a station and a halt in North America, unless they're railroad employees or otherwise have sufficient technical knowledge on railroad operations. I think it's inaccurate to say this definition isn't generally used in the U.S., since I have in fact come across other mappers' work where they mapped according to the "no switches" definition. Perhaps we should say there isn't a consensus yet.
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Comment from Minh Nguyen
What’s the rationale for making so many stations into undifferentiated halts, other than a rule on the wiki that was meant for very different countries? The distinction between fixed stops and flag stops is common among American passenger rail systems (and bus and light rail systems for that matter).
Amtrak is unique in that they don’t have to remind passengers to flag down trains at flag stops, since the reservation system does it for them electronically. But try explaining to a layperson that Cincinnati’s grand terminal is but a halt because there are no switches visible in aerial imagery. And consider what impact the German rule would have on other rail systems: a distinction based on the presence of switches, which is much more arcane than a flag stop rule that passengers get reminded about.
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Comment from clay_c
What makes the presence of switches "arcane"? They're quite important in railroad operations and scheduling. The halts are all tagged simultaneously as public_transport=station and train=yes, which I would argue are the tags relevant to passengers.
Cincinnati Union Terminal has a large, ornate station building, for sure. It certainly was at one point a "station". As of today, that station is a freight yard with a single passenger platform on the side. The switches belong to the yard, not the passenger platform. I don't think a large headhouse or a historical status as a station are enough to call it a station today.
As I understand it, the public_transport tag contains the relevant information for passenger operations and the railway tag is for underlying infrastructure of railways. I hope I'm helping by exposing this distinction to the public by tagging halts. To change them back to stations, I'd have to add something like note="missing switches" to avoid losing information, and I'm reluctant to do that.
Best,
Clay -
Comment from Minh Nguyen
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:railway%3Dhalt primarily refers to size, the presence of a platform, and whether trains stop always or only by request. If you had instead changed these nodes to railway=halt on the basis that there’s no shelter or station building, that would’ve better fit the documentation and thus data consumers’ expectations.
The rule about the presence of switches is specifically for German-speaking countries. Back in 2015, a mapper edited the page to apply this definition to the whole world, seemingly without discussion, but that change was reverted several months later. It’s possible that some of the switch-based tagging you’ve seen was from that time period. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Tag:railway%3Dhalt&action=history
For this rule to be adopted in North America as well, it would need to be discussed on talk-us or at least OSMUS Slack. This changeset comment thread isn’t enough because the switchover to railway=halt happened across multiple changesets. Together, they affected roughly 60% of all Amtrak stations nationwide, but only Amtrak stations, so now the map is inconsistent within the U.S. I’m not saying you necessarily have to go through the whole mechanical edit process, since you went through the trouble of manually inspecting each stop. But data consumers and other mappers should be kept in the loop about the changes taking place.
By the way, you can map the switches themselves as railway=switch nodes. That way we won’t lose information about switches no matter how the discussion turns out. I’m unaware of a special tag for distinguishing flag stops, since that was the original meaning of railway=halt.
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Comment from clay_c
Fair enough, I'm convinced. I'll keep that in mind going forward. I should probably mention that I've been mapping commuter rail stations across the Northeast according to the switchless definition. I'll follow up in a private message about what to do going forward.
That said, the presence of switches indicates something meaningful about the station itself—that is, whether trains may terminate or reverse direction there. So if these get changed back to railway=station, I'd hope to retain the information with a tag like terminus=no.
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