StreetComplete - "Is it lit?"

Communities Eesti (Estonia)
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Lately happened to stumble upon a situation with StreetComplete where it asks for different stuff if these stuffs are lit. For an instance, is bus stop lit, is pedestrian crossing lit, is path lit and so on.
A lot of the times none of these are lit but at the same time since next to these places vehicle road is running vehicle road is lit and that light is illuminating everything else near-by, including pedestrian crossings or bus stops and so on.

How should stuff be marked as lit in such situation where vehicle road light is illuminating everything else?
Do we consider explicity and/or implicity of lightning over some feature?
For an instance pedestrian crossing over vehicle road having additional lightning for the crossing itself and at the same time the vehicle road is lit and that light is also illuminating crossing. Same with bus stop where bus stop has a shelter, the shelter has no lightning but vehicle road lights are very close and are illuminationg bus stop at least partially.

Best regards!

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How should stuff be marked as lit in such situation where vehicle road light is illuminating everything else?
Do we consider explicity and/or implicity of lightning over some feature?

IMHO lit means there is sufficient light to see, it doesn’t mean the thing has to have a dedicated light, it is sufficient if nearby street lights provide light

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That is what I also thing but thought I would clarify it for myself by asking others opinion.

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Occasionally I use lit=limited if the streetlamp is not really close, StreetComplete does not offer that option though.

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Lit values are about when it’s lit, not how well.

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Agreed. It is still somewhat subjective in marginal situations. I try to use common sense there, e.g. if that is cycleway, and the light from nearby street is so weak that I have to reduce speed by more than 50% on night, I will not tag it at lit=yes.

Uh, that is invalid tagging. Please do not assume what some value means by applying common English, instead consult the wiki for that key.

In this case, Key:lit wiki says:

limited: There are lights installed, but they are not always on during the night. Examples includes roads that have part-night street lighting in the United Kingdom. In some countries, such as Germany and Austria, they are specifically marked with a red band.

Which is something completely different than what it seems you’ve been using it for :cry:.

If you want to indicate how well the way/area/node is lit, there is lit:perceived=* tag instead, to be used in addition.

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It says " The verifiability of this key is disputed", LoL.

But anyway, thanks for sharing that ‘common English’ is not the common language at OSM. I’ll keep that in mind.

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This clarifies quite well

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It does. It also links to its talk page which discusses the issue. To be completely objective, mappers would have to carry around (recently calibrated) luxmeters at night, which might be a tad inconvenient for average mapper. As it is, that tag is somewhat subjective, although the current version of the page takes some effort to make it more objective and verifiable.

Still, if you think the lack of precision is making lit:perceived=* unusable for use case, nobody is forcing you to use it.

I’m just mentioning it as an tag for those who would like to record how good lighting is, even if it is somewhat subjective (just like smoothness=*, or mtb_scale=* or tracktype=*, or sac_scale=* etc). You seem to have indicated that you wanted to tag that meaning sometimes, so I’d though it would be useful information to you too.

If you intended it to be ironic, please be advised that such finesse is often lost in written conversation, so it is much better to be explicit if one wants to avoid misunderstandings. (and if my sarcasm detector is misdetecting here, and you meant that earnestly, no worries, clarifications in this post still apply!)

My point was that the idea that you might get just by knowing that the words in key/value mean in English language (e.g. by looking them up in English dictionary) may lead you to incorrectly believe that the tag means something that it does NOT.

E.g. in you specific case, it seems that you didn’t consult OSM wiki, and (just from knowing the English meaning of the words which make up that tag!) concluded that lit=limited tagging on some object means that “it is lit with limited amount of light reaching the area”, when in fact that tag means something else in OSM (“Only in limited number of situation is it lit, and in all other cases lights are completely off, i.e. it is unlit.”)

Thus my suggestion to look up what tag means and how it is used before one starts using it for the first time. It was not intended as an attack on yourself or anyone else (everybody makes mistakes sometimes!), but as a friendly suggestion on simple procedure to make the OSM map better in the future - which is something we all hopefully wish to accomplish. :heart:

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A bit off topic but Im curious about the lit:limited.
In more and more places they turn light off at 11pm or midnight, should that be considered limited instead of yes then ?

Also how would you tag the time the lights turn off ? In France, at city limits they have signs that say “we turn off the lights at 11pm” but not what time they turn on. Can we use “lit:sunset-23:00” for example then ?

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Sunrise and sunset are mentioned in opening_hours wiki entry. I think in that case they are valid values for lit too.

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Yes. If you look at examples page for Key:lit - OpenStreetMap Wiki, you’ll see that the example for limited is sign saying “No street lighting midnight to 5:30am”.

Use light:lit=* syntax (one of the special values, or opening_hours syntax. There is also some undocumented use of lit:time_interval=*, but, being undocumented, I’d avoid using it.

Trying to use those in lit=* tag directly is not documented, so most probably would result in data consumers being unable to parse it, thus likely ignoring lit tag completely. I’d recommend instead this combination:

lit=limited
light:lit=sunset-23:00
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