Tags for taxi feeder ranks

General talk Tagging general discussion
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Following on from a “have we got a tag for this?” thread where the answer seemed to be ‘no’: It seems to be reaonably common for airports to have remote “feeder ranks” that are used as overflow waiting/queueing areas for taxis. I don’t think they can necessarily be used as a normal rank. It wouldn’t surprise me if these were common at other high throughput locations (more examples welcome).

These ones don’t seem to have a public facing component so I’m not sure if they should have the normal amenity=taxi tagging (although this suggests feeders generally allow pickups). The ones I have been able to find generally seem to be tagged as parking, but parking doesn’t normally work on a strict first in first out policy. Having tags for these might conceivably be useful for any maps aimed at taxi drivers or who are trying to sell them services even if they aren’t particularly useful for the general public.

Examples already in OSM:

  • Heathrow has what I think is a two part feeder (part mapped as a normal rank and part as parking).
  • Birmingham has one tagged as parking here.
  • Manchester Airport has this way that seems to match the location described on their website.

Potential tags:

  • amenity=taxi + taxi_rank=feeder (to avoid confusion with taxi access tag), implies the public can use this to get a taxi (not sure this is always true).
  • public_transport=taxi_feeder
  • public_transport=taxi_overflow
  • landuse=industrial + industrial=depot + depot=taxi_queueing
  • a subtag of highway=rest_area might work, but would spring a new condition on existing data consumers
  • amenity=parking + parking=taxi_queue_overflow as suggested on the other thread by @stevea
  1. How do we think these might best be recorded?
  2. Should we have some manner of relation linking the start of queueing to the final pickup points?
  3. Are there any other “staging area” type features that we could borrow tagging from?
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  1. Just use some restriction= . FIFO may be something new, similar to parking:staggered= .
  2. Although it should not be a public_transport= feature, it could belong to a =stop_area . This can transition taxis to be compatible public_tranport .
  3. There are ferry and train vehicle loading queues. As well as some church parking.
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Other airport examples:

These arguably have infrastructure: dedicated service roads / tarmaced areas, lift barriers, maybe toilets, portacabins or small building for rest / shelter / food?

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