This proposal consists of a tag on railway crossing nodes to denote that train-horn (whistle) operation at said crossing is different from national law/standard (US quiet zones/Canadian whistle bans, wayside horn operations, or places on a rail network where trains need to use their horns despite such not normally being required). See Proposed features/Level crossing train horn usage - OpenStreetMap Wiki for the details, and please discuss this proposal on its Wiki Talk page.
Please, cross post this announcement on the tagging mailing list on my behalf by sending an email to: tagging@openstreetmap.org
The sound from the horn turns an uncontrolled crossing into a controlled one. It is kind of traffic-signals. I’d like to read a short sentence on this in the proposal. So people can get an idea, how this relates to ongoing debates on the subject of crossings/intersections. Or would that push too much into politics?
I’ve always treated the debates around highway=crossing (pedestrian crossings of highways) as separate from the situation with railway=level_crossing as the two are treated very differently outside the OSM context. (Pedestrians may have rights with regards to cars, but road users never have rights with regards to trains.) You’ll also notice that there is no equivalent refinement to the “type” of a railway=level_crossing or railway=crossing, unlike a highway=crossing. (iD offers a type/markings field for railway=crossing nodes at the moment, but it probably shouldn’t be used for anything since the presence or absence of marking or signalization isn’t as meaningful in this context as it is when you’re crossing a highway feature.)
This looks well-researched. crossing:horn=optional and crossing:horn=wayside make sense to me as an American. It seems like this tagging scheme is sufficient for railway networks elsewhere in the world, though I’d like to hear from more railway mappers outside of North America.