Add rail-centric tags to vector tiles

[flha127]

Hi,

I am making a stylesheet similar to what OpenRailwayMap did (see below), would it be possible to add these tags:

For railways:
electrified
high speed
usage

For highways/railways indoor=yes and covered=yes should be added as they are similar to tunnel=yes.

For highways/railways and bridges the layer tags would help with rendering.

[1ec5]

Awesome, there was talk of this in #405, but I’m glad you’re taking the initiative to create the style yourself! I agree that these keys are important for making a reasonable rail-centric historical map.

For railways:
electrified
high speed
usage

Presumably these would be based on the electrified=yes, service=high_speed, and usage=* tags, respectively.

usage would also be helpful for mitigating the recent Historic style changes that have deemphasized railways: #608 (comment). The change was apparently motivated by minor rail lines and tram lines creating information overload. usage=main could be reemphasized without crowding out other kinds of features in urban areas.

/cc @vknoppkewetzel

[Bauer33333]

"Presumably these would be based on the electrified=yes, service=high_speed, and usage=* tags, respectively."

Service=high_speed describes route relations, not tracks. Afaik service can also already be used to render tiles. What he would need is highspeed=yes.
Electrified=yes is also rare and discouraged to be used, you would usually give a value that tells the kind of electrification.

[jeffreyameyer]

Opened up a forum discussion here - seems weird to divert from gh to a forum, but might generate some different input...

[jeffreyameyer]

@flha127 - we've kicked off the addition of a rail-specific layer. Please be sure to see this update & this ticket: #405.

[danrademacher]

OK, so the specific ask here is to add these tags to the vector tiles:

• electrified=yes
• service=high_speed
• usage=* tags, respectively.

So we'd need that from @Rub21, though we've also had some concerns about overloading our tiles with too much data for tile load times/file size. I'm honestly not sure how we assess any minor addition to the tiles in terms of impact on overall map performance.

[Bauer33333]

@danrademacher Please note my comment here. The tags you mentioned where just a guess.
What he would need are:
electrified=*
highspeed=yes
and usage=*

[jeffreyameyer]

@Bauer33333 @flha127 - there's some discussion of putting the usage=* values in OHM into the type=* values in the vector tiles. It seems electrified=* and highspeed=* might be overlapping with other type=* values. Is the current expectation be that there'd be different styling for electrified or highspeed rail lines? If so, we'd need to add different values for those.

[Bauer33333]

Having usage in the types doesn't sound the worst idea at first, since the most common rail type to use usage= is only railway=rail . Taginfo for open_street_map shows quite a few trams and stuff with usage as well, but I have no idea what this tagging is trying to describe so I would ignore those for now. Usually you would only use service= on those what doesn't introduce any conflicts here.
I see conflicts with railway=narrow_gauge tho if we want to render usage= on them. Not sure how important that will become, nowadays (on OSM) narrow gauge rail networks have become a bit rare so you don't bother, but this looks different in a historical context.

I would call electrified= a nice to have right now and not a must have yet, especially compared to usage=, but it would be a very nice nice to have. Maybe flha has a different opinion on this since his style is the first one I've seen combining them. On ORM they use an extra style for electrification that shows voltage= and frequency= as well.

We could probably put highspeed= in type as well, since it is usually only used on tracks with usage=main.
See the current situation on OSM:

But I would go so far and say we should not render that yet, not before we have an established guideline what highspeed rail even means in a historical context:
Does the Lackawanna Cutoff qualify as high speed rail? If yes at which year is it considered too slow? Do we only tag modern highspeed lines as the OSM definition describes? ... Lots of open questions regarding that for me. It is not a top priority to answer them now, but I just don't feel we are there yet to render them (encouraging people to map them) without having conflicts about the definitions with those people later on

[flha127]

Good morning,
Sorry for this late response, I didn't see the notice.

If I understand correctly, you would like the content of the usage tag to be put as the value of the type tag?
If that's it then no it won't work, there should be two tags, one for the type of infrastructure rail= and the other for the use we make of it. Other types of rail= can also use this tag so this would create a conflict.
However usage and service cover the same idea, so we can suggest abandoning usage= and using only service= or the opposite.

The electrified tag is a must have, historically electrification is a crucial date for a line. For the moment we can make do with electrified=*, voltage= and frequency= are less important and rarely used.

As for the modern definition of highspeed I would say a line with railway=rail+usage=main+electrified=* built from the 1950s with construction standards (as grade separation or min curve radius) allowing high speeds (let's say in the 1950s 250km/h at random) and a dedicated rolling stock.
Historically, it would be necessary to define the construction standards and the speed from which a line can be qualified as high speed (also before the 1950s electrification was not a key factor). For the first half of the 20th century I would say that the Lackawanna Cutoff meets both conditions.

In the same vein as highspeed= (improvement of infrastructure) a street_running= tag has its historical interest in seeing this other form of improvement. It can be implemented quite easily with:

• for railway=rail/subway/narrow_gauge street_running as an exception tagged street_running=yes ;
• and for railway=tram/light_rail for whom street_running is natural; the opposite with street_running=no.