In a given saddle, there will be only one natural=sadle. There can be as many mountains_pass=yes as there are ways going through it. Given One feature, one OSM element - OpenStreetMap Wiki, which of these should be named? I was editing the wiki page for mountain_pass and noticed both it and the wiki page for natural=saddle recommend applying a name. Is there some undocumented convention, or is it a mess (as usual :-D)? I for example looked at Node: ‪Brenner Pass‬ (‪508401093‬) | OpenStreetMap and there the tag is only applied to one road, even though there is many railways and a motorway right next to it.
A common sense tells me that this is the right approach - just pick one and use that, though there is also this thread that suggest to duplicate: Duplicate mountain passes - #3 by SekeRob
Another concern is whether it makes sense to also have this for railroads. There is 48 nodes that apply this tag (or natural=seddle) for railroads: overpass turbo That is about one thousandth of the 37 461 nodes overall. Should we just say this should only be used on highways?
Yet they share a name. I doubt you have a mountain_pass with a recognizable name and a saddle with a recognizable name - instead in real world, you have a place with a recognizable name, ecompassing both the saddle and the mountain_pass. So it is fine to map both with their appropriate tag, but it does not make sense to apply the same name to both. It is not tagging for the renderer to then find it weird when the same name is displayed twice.
Many, I would say a great many different types of osm elements have the same name.
natural=volcano and natural=peak are a clear example, but each one has its properties, among which is the name itself and they do not represent any conflict for the renderer.
Can you give an example where the renderer finds it strange, weird or an error that a name is represented twice?
I would understand that for QA purposes, two elements with the same tagging and name close to each other might be detected as a possible error (Nominatim QA). However, two different elements with different tagging that only share the same name should not trigger any alerts or be candidates for QA.
I suppose the main concern apart from the two similar names would also be the icons, the same icon but with a different color.
mountain_pass=yes is the quality of an object (highway=*)
natural=saddle It is an object (geographical feature)
If the two coincide exactly on a highway node, would there be problems if natural=saddle + mountain_pass=yes is used? I wouldn’t know, generally they shouldn’t coincide in the same position if we apply the strict interpretation of the definition of natural=saddle (The lowest point along a ridge or between two mountain tops).
It’s the same name, yes. But they’re two different objects with two different icons. I don’t see a problem with that. Imagine a shopping mall, with dozens of shops, and many of them have the same name. A cafe, a bakery, a bar, and a restaurant all have the same name and are close to each other; there is no mistake there, nor name rendering conflicts, it’s the same as with saddle and mountain_pass.
In the case of a mall, when you ask a random person whether a bakery and a restaurant are different things, everybody will say no. When you ask a random person whether a saddle and mountain_pass are different, they will be perplexed. When one talks about a pass or a seddle in a non-technical context, I am pretty sure they mean a place, that is the general area, a gap between mountains. mountain_pass is just an imaginary thing here placed on a highway - it might be useful to know for example how far it is to the top, of course, so no objections to mapping it, however naming it if there is also named seddle is inventing names, I think.
What would also make sense would be to put them into a relation and naming the relation (or multiploygon? can you have multipolygon out of nodes? I think not, but not sure now), though that would probably unrender them.
There are some where there is not path through the saddle, then there are the ones where mountain_pass is not mapped (it is only half as popular as saddle). For a lot of saddles where there are roads, maybe it is more typical that the lowest point is not used.
I think it’s similar tobridge=yes and man_made=bridge, isn’t it? One is a property of a highway and the other is the structure itself.
The suggestion on the bridgewiki page is to tag the bridge name on the highway if that’s how it is signposted, even if the bridge structure is mapped separately.
That’s how it is done here, for example. As this case shows, where the road has two carriageways we end up with the bridge name tagged 3 times.
In the case of a mountain pass, if the road has a sign with the name of the pass and the elevation, it seems natural that mappers would want to tag those things on the highway - even if the geographical saddle is a few metres lower down and off to one side.
I don’t think it is an exact analogy. With a bridge, which is tagged on a way forming a highway segment, there is a potential conflict between street name and bridge name - I think that’s the reason signposting is mentioned. That doesn’t arise for a mountain pass tagged as a node, as a name on a node wouldn’t be interpreted as the highway name.
I was more suggesting that if we encourage mappers to tag the name on both the highway attribute and the feature itself for bridges, it’s hard to see why that should be discouraged for saddles.
(Maybe “remains” was meant to be “retains”).
Well, I find it strange that tagging both is encouraged, however I can at least see that a road passing through a bridge is a different thing. Though I would normally assume that a named road does not lose its name just because it passes over a bridge - I would understand a sign saying “Bridge A” to apply to the bridge, not to the road on the bridge.
The more I think about it, a relation that would encompass both sounds like the cleanest solution. Am I really the only one who finds having the same name appear twice on the map as ugly and user-unfriendly?
For the bridges over the Liffey in Dublin, for example, the street names are different on each side of the river so the bridge name is in effect the street name for that bit of street that is carried by the bridge. Then there are unnamed motorways like the example I linked to. So possibly a lot of situations where a bridge does not carry a continuously named highway.
To be honest I hadn’t noticed it. Looking around mountainous areas I know, generally the saddle and mountain pass are tagged on the same node. Apart from that, “ugly things on the map” are often rendering rather than tagging issues.
natural=saddle have appeared on maps for a very long time, used and named for centuries.
But a large majority of mountain_passe share the same name; you can even see the sign with the name next to the highway. My point of view is that they are very different elements; even your example, if I put it in 3D, shows the differences between them. The fact is, you can’t take the mountain_pass out of the highway=* and joining it with the natural=saddle means moving it from its original point to take it to the highway=* and there it would lose its function (Point out the lowest point along a ridge or between two mountain tops)
True, inside of a city, the name of the bridge is typically the name of the bridge.
Hm, not sure in this case. At least with the bridge, the name of the way is rendred in the way and the bridge is named separately, so it looks ok. But wanting the renderer to display just one name sounds like a lot of work for the renderer. It would need to look for nodes with the same name with vicinity and then guess they are the same thing. Do renderers routinely do such a thing? In my experience not so much. And yeah, for the example of volcanoes, I also do find it strange to have a name applied and displayed twice. The mountain is the volcano.
I am not sure we understand each other here. I have not problems with these two tags coexisting. I just think only one of them should bear a name when both are present and distinct somewhere.
BTW: funny, the 3D thing suggests the saddle is misplaced :-D (but history of the node I guess suggest local knowledge).
As far as I know mountain saddles without a path, track or road allowing to pass them, usually do not carry names. The peaks do, but not the saddles. There may be exceptions but that is my own experience from travelling, and it makes sense because the term “pass” does not come from saddle, but from a way passing the saddle.
As mentioned earlier, the pass name usually is found on a sign beside a road, track or path, and as such I understand it as a property of the way and not of the saddle. Only in those cases where a pass is signboarded twice, once at the way passing the saddle and again somewhere in the wayless landscape close to the lowest point of the saddle I would tag the name to the way + to the saddle but to be honest I have never seen a situation like that.
In cases where 2 or more ways are passing a saddle and are separately signed with the pass name I would not hesitate to map the names separately, although I agree, a name rended two, three or even more times side by side (which is quite common in carto) looks weird.
If they are exactly the same thing, only one node is needed.
If the highest point on the road is different from the lowest point on the ride, then they are not quite the same thing and it feels odd to tell mappers to avoid naming one because it doesn’t look nice.
