Clean-up and Standardization of Electric Vehicle Charging Tagging
The tagging system for electric vehicle charging connectors within OpenStreetMap exhibits considerable inconsistency and confusion.
This proposal aims to clarify and standardize the tagging system to reflect current standards and practices. It addresses the misuse of tags related to Tesla charging standards and proposes the introduction of new tags to accurately differentiate between plugs/sockets and AC/DC.
While this proposal focuses on EV charging, the changes can also be applied to other chargers.
Hooboy, that’s a big can of worms, with multiple factors, the biggest one perhaps being how quickly things are changing in that space. Level 2 or DCFC? CCS, Tesla, or CHadeMO? What power, what network? Possibly the best informational tag would be a link to its entry at Plugshare.
An alternate challenge would be to convince Plugshare to start backending to OSM instead of google-maps?? Plugshare is way better at keeping up with the industry – they have agreements with charging networks, sometimes for realtime updates of charger status [free, in-use, down, etc]. Not to discourage the idea of indicating where chargers are at some superficial level, but keeping it detailed would be an endless chase.
The rate of changes slows down now as the technology gets more and more standards and wide use. But the use of socket for plugs is a mistake that was made a long time ago, and has nothing to do with changes. Better to clean thing up now than in a few years when the amount of chargers got 100x.
Connection to other databases are nice to have, but not part of this Proposal. And I don’t want to rely on external Databases for static information. And for EVs chargers are routing relevant. With my gasoline car I always used OsmAnd for navigation, because the OpenStreetMap data was better than any commercial map. But now on the Tesla, at least for longer trips I use the internal navigation that makes some strange routings, but knows the chargers and calculates them as stops into the route.