As Europe is one again burning away, I wondered why air_conditioning is not be used on regular relations according to Wiki air_conditioning
Looking at taginfo we have about 4k relations - mostly bus/train relations - with air_conditioning=yes and I think more important we even have some bus routes with air_conditioning=no like e.g relation/1710460
Especially in many cities where old and new vehicles are being used it would be great if data consumer could show this.
TLDR: If there are no objections I would like to adjust the wiki, that is add regular relations and add route=busroute=train to the examples listed.
Obviously this requires local knowledge, like what vehicles are used on which routes, but I guess that’s what OSM is all about.
Equipment, amenities, or services on the vehicles are usually avoided, or at least not added for now. wheelchair= , bicycle= , and motor_vehicle= / service= are exceptions for modes of transport. You are getting towards tracking the fleet / rolling stock used.
Somewhat related: the wiki talks about “nodes, ways, areas and relations” which it actually means topological “points, open or closed lines, polygons/multipolygons, and other sorts of relations”. To be fair to it, when you hover over the images on the page that is exactly what you see; the third one says “may be used on areas (and multipolygon relations)” and the fourth “should not be used on relations (except multipolygon relations)”.
I suspect that the sort of relation that someone thought that it shouldn’t be used on is e.g. a site relation. Like you, I can see the point on some route relations, if all of the vehicles on a bus route are air conditioned, for example.
Ultimately the wiki is supposed to document OSM usage, so your suggested change makes sense to me.
Yeah, this is somewhat true. But given all the things we track with OSM it’s not that the rolling stock changes very often, rather opposite. I would assume that in most countries it will be very similar to what I know from germany and other eurpean countries, where the vehicles used usually change every about 15-20. And at least for most train routes it’s not the hardest thing to resurvey. For bus routes it may be more difficult, that is true.
A lot of countries or local operators also now have a hard requirement for AC for every new rolling stock.
as long as it clarifies that tagging =yes=no makes sense if we somehow know it applies to approximately all vehicles (if there is occasional exception when they use backup vehicle it is fine)
I guess the potential issue is not so much changes in rolling stock as the use of different rolling stock on the same route. I known that DART commuter trains in Ireland have significant numbers of carriages both with and without air conditioning. It’s not really verifiable on the ground in that situation, unless you spend a day riding different trains.
This is precisely the problem – you would be better served by adding this information to a GTFS-Realtime consumer app, which can inspect the carriage number and give you the information for mixed stock.
At that point, you are basically copying that information into OSM - why not just integrate this app into whatever is using the air_conditioning tag?
OSM is for geospatial things. Routes are at least somewhat spatial in the same sense that administrative boundaries are spatial. Temporal/non-physical things can be useful if they are permanent for some duration of time.
OpenStreetMap doesn’t need to contain everything. I think this information is better provided by the transit operator along with their schedules in GTFS or a similar format; If they don’t, this could be something to work with them to publish openly. Connecting people to publish open data is just as important as mapping what’s there - that’s what OSM is about.
