Charging station sockets: `type2_cable`

General talk
,
1

@mcliquid is currently implementing a quest in StreetComplete that asks which sockets are available at a station that has nothing tagged yet.

Now, a quite problematic change that has been made to the wiki documentation for socket:* when it comes to the type2 charging socket

330Ă—243 17.3 KB

in June 2020 has come to my attention. The addition of type2_cable.

The wiki page edit history does not contain a link to a discussion or anything. Later editions of the wiki page first warned, then noted that most type2 sockets are tagged with type2 even so they might have a cable as type2_cable appeared in the documentation only much later.

Why the addition of type2_cable is problematic

type2_cable was added a good six years after people started to use type2.

https://taghistory.raifer.tech/#***/socket%3Atype2/&***/socket%3Atype2_cable/

type2_cable is defined as “type2 but definitely on a cable”. Since at the same time, no type2_no_cable or similar was introduced, this implicitly changed the definition of type2. Any charging station tagged with type2 now has either

  • just a socket, without cable
  • OR maybe it has a cable (it was tagged earlier or user didn’t care about the distinction)

No way out

Hence type2 is now ambiguous, and there is no way out unless we have a way to explicitly tag that indeed there is no cable. To my knowledge, there is no such tag.

We could take the introduction of a quest in StreetComplete as an opportunity to do away with this ambiguity, if we can get consensus on which tag to use for that.

Suggestions

We could introduce type2_no_cable. This would be consistent with type2_cable. On the other hand, this tag was not well thought out from the start. It mixes another information right into the socket key (the cable).Couldn’t this have been done with a subtag like socket:type2:cable=yes?

So maybe, we could use socket:type2:cable=yes to denote whether the socket is attached to a cable
The main reason that would speak against this is if on the one and same charging station, there would be one type2 without a cable and one with cable. But to be honest, we have the same problem with (max) currents: We currently also cannot map a charging station that has two type2 sockets where each has a different max current. :person_shrugging:

4 Likes
2

That’s already done quite often:

socket:type2 = 10;4
socket:type2:output = 22kW;11kW

Or just use the existing socket:type2_cable=no.

socket:type2=1
socket:type2_cable=1

That’s not ambiguous because there is no other reason to have both tags on the same object.

4 Likes
3

My view:

  • Accept that “socket” can be used for both the hole end or the cable end. Don’t get too worked up about the exact definition of the word “socket”. (This applies to many OSM tags were the exact word used in the tag is not ideal but is what we have now).
  • Don’t change type2_cable → it is clear what it means.
  • I also wouldn’t worry about the type2 tag. As an EV user you should expect to bring your own cable to use it but if you turn up and find it should be tagged as type2_cable then it’s not like you have a problem; leave your cable in the boot/trunk and use the tethered cable :-)
3 Likes
4

Oh, that’s valid? Looks like this is the solution, then

2 Likes