Unify the departures_board and passenger_information_display keys.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Unify_departure_boards
Please discuss this proposal on its Wiki Talk page.
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I consume both as meaning the same thing, and have wondered how it was that OSM ended up with two tags for (what seems to me to be) the same concept. Do you have any familiarity with the history that explains why there are two?
One more thing - the proposal contains the sentence “It shows the exact and absolute time at which trains/buses/… arrive resp. depart.”. I’m not sure what “arrive resp. depart” means here - does it just mean “depart”? Departure boards usually show when public transport services depart; sometimes they might show arrival time as well, and sometimes arrivals will be shown on a separate board.
Personally, I wouldn’t suggest making any change to departures_board=* tagging as part of this proposal; it’ll just give some people a reason to vote against it.
It’d be interesting to know why people who have used passenger_information_display=* rather than departures_board=* have done so - maybe there’s some nuance to the meaning that I am unaware of.
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I don’t know either, but looking at usage near me, it amuses me to note that there is a “hard border” between Spain and Gibraltar in this respect. In La Linea, and the south of Spain generally, departures_board is the majority choice by a huge distance. But Gibraltar votes 100% for passenger_information_display.
I’m glad that someone decided to work on this, so thank you for taking the time.
Given that the goal is to “Unify departure boards” would it not make sense to also provide tagging for arrivals boards (probably most common in airports, but I think I’ve also seen them in train stations).
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Sadly, not really. When I started with OSM, both tags already were in use. Looking at the chronology at Taginfo, it seems like departures_board was “invented” to years later, probably exactly because mor fine-grained values were wanted, but I don’t know for sure.
“arrive resp. depart” is short for “arrive respectively departe”, basically the same as “arrive/departe”. In my region, this is basically the same for trains, but I have seen some talking about arrival times, so I wasn’t sure how it is handled elsewhere. But as @1998alexkane pointed out, it was likely mainly relevant for planes. I can change it in the proposal text.
Yeah, I’ve been quite unsure about this one. At first, I just wanted to unify the keys, but while researching, I found that one of the reasons against departures_board were the badly worded values. I tried to find a compromise by only changing departures_board=delay, against which there is the strongest rejection and also it because it’s only used a few hundred times, so it shouldn’t cause much trouble. But I am totally open to leave it as is, whatever has the bigger chance of getting the first part passed.
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Hm, I was mainly focused at trains and busses, and around me, they only show departures, so I have very little knowledge of the specifics there. What exactly would you propose to change/introduce for them?
Not a comment on the proposal (which seems like a good idea), but just a side note in general:
I’ve seen many native German speakers on this forum use this “resp.” construction. (not only here, so I don’t mean to single you out or anything! See e.g. Do we really NEED railway=tram_crossing resp tram_level_crossing?). I don’t think they’re aware that this abbreviation and phrasing, which I’ve been told is a direct translation from a German abbreviation, is not idiomatic English, and moreover is basically unintelligible to native English speakers, be they UK or US.
What I think would be a more understandable way to phrase this is “the time at which trains arrive or depart” (the abbreviation resp. for respectively is fairly rare in casual usage). You could say “arrive or depart, respectively” if you had previously referred to a separate term for each.
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I haven’t seen any boards showing arrival times (for trains) even at large train stations around me. Trains usually just stay at a station to let passengers in and out, and even when they wait for longer, it’s just shown when they departe again. Therefore, I didn’t really consider it important to indicate whether a board showa departure times, arrival times or both. Also, I wouldn’t know a simple way to effectively tag this.
Yeah, I just know the German word and this was the first translation I found for it. Sorry if it’s not understandable for native English speakers (or just anyone not natively German). “or” would probably just be the better term in the first place. Thanks!
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The situation at least in Germany is that the law requires a printed timetable to always be present. In addition, operators can choose to have some electronic devices or not. Very rarely they are clamped down to only show departure times.
Almost always these are general purpose displays that show whatever the operators central computer deems to be a useful information. Almost always this includes information about service interruptions and general announcements like “construction work ahead next week”. Many also switch between arrivals, extra information for the next departure (e.g. platform section information for wheelchair accessible cars, via stations or similar) and static times.
It is a sophisticated task for the operators’ computer systems to obtain reliable real-time information from vehicles, so quite often it shows static times instead. As many operators (half a dozen is quite usual here) may share the same stop, it gets even more unpredictable what information really is shown on the display.
In that sense departures_board would predictably end up as non-information, because the perception of people (and mappers) here is that the printed timetable is not notable at all, and that the display is exactly that, a general purpose display.
I am not aware of any law in this regard, but I know from experience that it can happen, especially in rural areas, that there is no board at all at a bus stop. Yes, of course the vast majority have one, but that’s why it makes sense to map it.
I don’t quite get you here: This proposal doesn’t really change the meaning of the departures_board, so if it’d be non-information, why is it used over 40,000 times (on par with passenger_information_display). Apparently there are quite a few mappers who consider this to be relevant information. Or have I misunderstood what you mean by that?
This might have been the original intention, but how much is it true today? The German wiki page lists departures_board=realtime and passenger_information_display as synonyms. And at least I hadn’t realised in my region that the mappers knew the difference between the two tags, let alone used them in the same way. Admittedly, it is always difficult to recognise the original intention of a mapper though.
But furhermore, as passenger_information_display is a boolean value and, as you pointed out, there can be many types of additional passenger information that could be shown (arrivals, extra information for the next departure (e.g. platform section information for wheelchair accessible cars, via stations or similar) and static times), this key doesn’t actually tell a user much. So if you see a station with passenger_information_display=yes the only information you can reliably expect to be present are the realtime times, as they are the most common.
I’ve thought myself that this.
Though in my case specifically, I’m mostly thinking of micromapping and adding nodes where you can find passenger information displays.[1]
The individual key still makes sense as an addition to public_transport=platform akin to stuff like bin, bench and shelter and can also be combined (and at least for bus stops, can be combined with the highway=bus_stop node if one exists since that’s the expected place where you wait).
Basically, I’m asking if you can expand the proposal to formally include the possibility to micromap the individual displays.
Which itself is quite varied: At least here in Germany, most bus stops use paper timetables at minimum but some more important ones also come with a dot matrix display which shows the incoming buses (and how much they’re delayed), often in separate places, though. Train stops OTOH are in the latter layout as the minimum (which shows the incoming train as well as how much it’s delayed) but major stops use LED displays which allows for greater details like the state of the next trains, their length and other stuff. ↩︎
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In my case, it’s laziness moreso than the fact that I’m German: I got annoyed with writing out and ... respectively for so long and use resp. as a shorthand thereof.