Hi all,
The way we tag “crossings” in OSM has many tagging problems - this is one of them. I’d like to clean out the zoo and restrict it to the UK, where it should have been contained in the first place.
EDIT: the actual proposal can be found at Proposal:Deprecating crossing ref - OpenStreetMap Wiki
I appreciate the sentiment. Free the animals in captivity!
As for the U.S., most occurrences were specifically intended to show the global community that we needed crossing:markings=*. Now that that’s approved, we can migrate most of the occurrences over to the new tagging scheme, based on this handy pair of diagrams:
That leaves a few common values:
hawk is for a crosswalk that features HAWK beacons. As the avian name suggests, this is considered a whole configuration, with a similar scope as the British crossing_ref=* values. It may be difficult to deconstruct a HAWK installation into its various parts so that data consumers can reliably reconstruct this attribute, but it’s certainly open to discussion.school is for school crossings. This is currently exclusive to California, where school crossing is a legal designation. It corresponds to yellow markings (which conflict with federal law) and some special traffic rules.pedestrian_scramble is for pedestrian scrambles. I suspect we’ll just go along with whatever the global community decides for this one.rrfb is for a crosswalk that features RRFBs. It’s a different kind of beacon than the one that flashing_lights=yes normally refers to, capable of getting more attention from drivers. Sometimes it’s mounted above the crossing sign, while other times it’s embedded in the sign or in the roadway.Nothing else is used more than a handful of times, so we don’t really need to worry about it.
There probably should be some tag to describe legal and country-specific features of a crossing which can’t be captured by the other crossing: tags (the UK can’t be alone in that), something like crossing:ref=GB:zebra[EDIT: not necessarily using “ref”, something else is almost certainly better]? We could then get rid of both crossing=zebra and crossing_ref=zebra.
The long tail of crossing_ref=* values is from people thinking it’s the key for the crossing’s reference number. designation=* is always an option for the legal designation. For the design typology, maybe post_box:design=* or model=* could offer some inspiration.
Perhaps crossing:designation then, e.g. crossing:designation=GB:zebra, crossing:designation=US:hawk, crossing:designation=US-CA:school?
you wrote in the wiki it was used mainly in the UK but it is ussd globally and with mostly “zebra” as value
I once again invite to use flashing_lights:ref=rrfb
May I suggest focusing on a smaller area you are familiar with, rather than worldwide? For example I see 12 thousand uses of it in the Netherlands crossing_ref | Keys | OpenStreetMap Taginfo Netherlands. Discuss those with your local mappers, kill them off if they agree, and you’ll have made more progresss than making a worldwide proposal and hearing about hawks, pxos, and rrfbs.
I agree. To deprecate crossing_ref, there should be some other tag it can be deprecated in favor of.
In Germany, by far the most common crossing_ref value is zebra, which refers to the informal name for a “Fußgängerüberweg”. Not all features of a “Fußgängerüberweg” can currently be expressed with OSM tags, and even if they could, it would be preferable to have a single tag to describe this standardized and legally enshrined crossing type.
I’m not particular about the key. Something like crossing:designation would also work, of course.
The original proposal described it as:
So we’d be replacing a regional reference tag with another regional reference tag.
And then in three months someone else will have a radical rethink of the crossing tags and it’ll all change again.
I’m from Belgium and already retagged most of the crossing_refs. I’ll probably start compaigning in the most used communities.
Well, seems like Germany has a “ensemble description” for crossing_ref too, which makes sense for Germany. I’ll leave Germany out the proposal then.
Don’t worry, Key:crossing is on my kill-list as well. It might be my next target. See my diary post Pieter Vander Vennet's Diary | The total mess of tagging crossings and a way to move forward | OpenStreetMap
What’s missing is basically a way to describe the priority of the crossing users. Simplified:Either pedestrians have priority over the cars or the other way around.
Something simple like crossing:priority=yes/no could be enough to describe whether the *=crossing-way has priority or not.
For all the rest we have keys and might just need additional values. Like if you not only want to describe there are traffic lights but go further into details.
The real world is a lot more complicated than a simple tag. Just two examples that are very common in DE:
How do you tag those (usually unmarked) crossings where pedestrians have to wait for through traffic, but have priority over turning cars?
How do you tag “zebra” crossings that are part of a mixed foot/bicycle path where pedestrians have priority over road traffic, but cyclists need to wait?
The priority in these cases can be inferred from the type of crossing and road geometry, but tagging them needs both subkeys and relations.
For sure you can put more effort in. But the ask is just to replace crossing_ref. None of your examples can be expressed at the moment by that tag. Basically you have zebra crossings with the priority topic in that key and all kind of signals/markings combination forming the rest of the zoo.
But sure, the boolean can be replaced by the categories like foot, bicycle…and you can even use ; to specify multiple of them.
crossing:priority:turn=left;right (a question of definition, and should be enough for four-way junctions)crossing:priority:foot= =path / =cycleway / =footway + crossing:priority:bicycle= =carriageway / =road / =trunk / etc?
The idea was discussed before in UK [Talk-GB] Tagging UK Parallel crossings - Zebra for cycles
The crossing= was once proposed too Proposal:Crossing=priority - OpenStreetMap Wiki
I would agree on this with @mueschel If you want to express anything above some way has always priority, we better go with relations. It’s not worth defining some fancy tags for up.to 4way crossings and then failing on dual carriage ways or 5way crossings or…
That post suggests replacing something that is accused of being too UK specific but does actually have contingencies for everywhere else and replacing it with something that is tailored solely to the situation in Belgium.
If anything that seems like a major step backwards not just in how much additional burden it puts on the mapper and mapping software but also on the amount and quality of information you have to have available before you can improve the map.
Why have two tags when you can force everyone to fill out a twenty question survey?
Sorry, I confused you for another user, sorry about that! Well done cleaning up locally. I would suggest continuing region by region, so you can avoid making a global thread then hearing about everyone’s favourite local exceptions!