Mapping the whole platform, or only parts accessible to passengers?

aly6 · 2019-08-06T23:10:58.000Z

When mapping railway station platforms as closed ways, should the entire platform be mapped, or only the sections that passengers are allowed to access?

There are a few stations I know of, where a significant portion of the platform is off-limits to passengers (very narrow sections, staff areas, etc), and I’ve seen both of these methods being used to map this. The wiki pages for railway=platform and public_transport=platform don’t mention what should be done in cases like this…

lmason_aph · 2019-08-08T12:17:53.000Z

Here in the USA, when we map some of the places we do, most government officials/venue maintenance-administrators are very implicit about keeping non-public areas off of OSM, for security reasons. I know this is pretty generic, so take from it what you might

SK53 · 2019-08-08T20:17:00.000Z

Obviously what you choose to map initially should largely be determined by the primary use case, which I would expect to be multi-modal transport. So in the first instance probably the publicly accessible platform. However, if such mapping would give a misleading view then map all the platforms but add access restrictions. Note that I’m aware of platforms in the UK which are very rarely open to the public but do get used from time to time (for instance during works on the line), so it may be useful to have the information anyway. A good way of making the distinction clear is to map any barriers: UK railway platforms normally have a fence at the end of the public portion of the platform.

Additionally there are platforms which used to be much longer and are now no longer used. A life-cycle prefix is useful in this use-case.

Government officials may have views about what should & should not appear on OSM, but whether to accede to those views is a matter for the local community. As OSM is a form of freedom of speech I doubt that US officials can restrict what US citizens choose to map without infringing 1st amendment rights (I’m not sure to what extent the 1st amendment protects free expression rights of non-US citizens).

aly6 · 2019-08-09T22:00:46.000Z

Thanks for the advice!