Do not render rail=abandoned #542
Conversation
Per the wiki, railway=abandoned is used for railways where the rails have been removed. See also the picture on the wiki: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:railway%3Dabandoned Such abandoned railways should probably not be rendered on a general purpose map. This resolves gravitystorm#3332 on trac.
Do not render rail=abandoned
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I'm not sure that everyone will agree on this, but I've seen a few "abandoned" railway lines being rendered diagonally across well mapped housing estates, and it looks terrible. |
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Well I agree we should remove these. They look terrible and common in the UK. I have resorted to changing the tag to dismantled so they disappear! |
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It was only closed after it had been merged :). |
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Doh sorry missed that. :) |
I support not rendering abandoned railway lines, but it's worth noting that a lot of the time objects like should be deleted because there's nothing there on the ground. |
I also support not rendering them, but IMHO you shouldn't delete them either and this should be discussed on talk and not here cheers, |
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I've been telling people for years, and just last weekend, "All the abandoned railways in New York State can be found in OpenStreetMap. Isn't OpenStreetMap great!!" How do I find all these people to tell them "Oops, sorry, actually OpenStreetMap hates abandoned railways, you actually want OpenRailwayMap.org". How do I go back to all these websites where I've left URLs pointing to abandoned railroads, e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/28368859 ? Of course, that doesn't work with openrailwaymap.org, so I cannot point to any abandoned railroad and have it be rendered on the map anymore. Not rendering something that you can see both on aerial photos and on the ground (e.g. the above URL -- check it for yourself) is simply wrong. The proper solution here is to restore the rendering of abandoned railroads, and when a dismantled railroad is in the database tagged railway=abandoned and cannot be found on the ground, it should be tagged railway=dismantled. And I will cheerfully confess that I have a lot of work to do, changing the tagging of railway=abandoned to railway=dismantled. But in the meantime, could you make my URLs work again, so that I don't look like a dunce? |
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The abandoned railways can still be found in OpenStreetMap (and no, we don't hate abandoned railways), just not in the main map. I know that doesn't help you, but it is a distinction worth mentioning. Considering way number 28368859: that railway is still visible because it has been converted into a path or track, see Google streetview. That path is currently missing, and should be added. The same abandoned railway also contains parts that are absolutely no longer visible in the landscape, such as here. It is not relevant for the general public that the hedge is build on top an abandoned railway, and for reasons like this, we decided not to render abandoned railways anymore on the main map. I understand that having abandoned railways on the map is important for the things you are doing, but I think creating a readable map for the general public is more important than showing the history of railway lines in the landscape (which I admit is very interesting). |
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Note that links in form of https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/28368859 still work - as selected way is highlighted. |
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Yes, the link still works, but there is no railway rendered. I suppose I'll have to live with it. Not every change breaks someone's workflow. For example, the removal of .../browse/... from the URLs simply redirects. No breakage. What about this tunnel? https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/208510275 Essentially the new rendering says that they don't exist, no matter how far you zoom in. I'm not used to this idea, and it will probably take me a while to understand why anybody thinks this is a good thing. I understand why railway=dismantled should not be rendered in a general purpose map. I don't understand why something that any fool can see exists isn't rendered at some zoom level. |
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IMHO [bridge=yes, railway=abandoned] should be rendered. The main problem is that railway=abandoned may be everything from "rails were stolen" to "only experts will notice that railway was here, long long time ago". |
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Another problem: the slippy map used by JOSM to download OSM data now no longer shows abandoned railroads. So when I want to edit one, I CAN'T SEE IT. I'm sure this is not a problem exclusive to abandoned or dismantled railroads. The problem here, as I see it, is that there is a conflict between goals of the traditional map we've used for a decade, and a map which is attractive to general users. I understand why it's not considered "pretty" to see an abandoned railroad running through a suburban residential tract, and that general users are not interested. But the map that we editors want to look at should have everything rendered. We need two sets of tiles, one for mappers (comprehensive and maybe not "pretty") and one for users (rendered as a "real" cartographer would do it, by selectively disincluding things). |
Yes, not everything is rendered. In fact it is impossible to render everything and have a readable map. The obvious problem is that different people want different things (see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues?state=open - many are some form of "I want X to be visible"). Unfortunately it seems that rail=abandoned was frequently used to tag places where any traces of railway disappeared - what is useless for almost everybody.
Anybody can make its own map (for example with Maperitive making map of restricted area is really easy, though making available it on the Internet or processing entire planet makes it significantly more difficult). Anyway, this project is about making general purpose map, not "display everything map". |
There are 8K people on Facebook's Abandoned Rails group who would be surprised that they're almost nobody. OpenStreetMap has given up on them in the hopes of attracting people who don't want to see abandoned railroads. AFAIK, the project has always been about creating a database, and letting other people make maps out of it. The OSM map has been targeted at mappers, so that at some zoom level, everything shows up. Now, I understand people's desire to have a general purpose pretty map when people first visit openstreetmap.org. Unfortunately, that map is more-or-less useless to mappers who look at the map, see that something is missing, then go to add it, only to find that it's already there. Can you see how this is destructive to the mapping process? Or have we decided that OSM is complete and it's time to start discouraging people from adding to the database? Because a pretty map will surely do that. |
Oh please Russ, don't so be melodramatic. Removing a feature from one particular map rendering is not "giving up" on a group of people. You know as well as the rest of us that it's impossible to show everything on one map style. That's why the main rendering has never shown bike routes, or hiking routes, or any number of other things, but these show up in different places and on different layers. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and I know that while there's always people who want a particular feature to show up on the main layer, tradeoffs have to be made. Removing abandoned railways - that is, railways that don't have trains or even rails any more - is a tradeoff that I'm happy to make. And remember what you said above - OpenStreetMap is the database, and is much bigger than any particular use of the data. And as they would say at the BBC: "Other Map Styles Are Available". |
This is blatantly untrue. |
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Which part is blatantly untrue, mkoniecz? That the OSM tiles have been positioned as "This is a resource only for our mappers. The fact that other people can make use of it is good for them, but a mere accident"? Or are you referring to the fact that relations have never been on the map? Not being melodramatic, Andy. I want to cry every time I see a cached tile pop up that still has abandoned rails on it, and then POOF they disappear as the cached copy is replaced by a new one. It's like seeing years of hard work disappear because of a hard drive crash. Worse, because this is being done ON PURPOSE. Having abandoned rails in the rendered map has never been a problem before, and suddenly it is? I think I probably wouldn't be having such a strong emotional response if I had had time to get used to the idea. Maybe if it had been published on the 'announce@lists.osm.org' mailing list first? But no, instead that announcement says "The style is designed to look as similar as possible to the old XML stylesheet." No worries there, abandoned railroads will still be rendered. Oops, no, they won't. So last weekend I'm telling people to find abandoned railroads by using OpenStreetMap, and less than a week later I'm played the fool. I mean, at least if I had known, I could have started saying "openrailwaymap" instead of "openstreetmap". |
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Russ, at this point your arguments for rendering this boil down to If you can point out a real world need backed by stats or strong use cases Given the specialized renderings already mentioned; you still have a place With all of the above considered, it's unlikely the outcome of this
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I realize that I'm mostly expressing butthurt and I thank you for listening. Several suggestions: |
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I can see a logic behind this, but it goes too far IMO.[1] We are now showing this feature at z16: but not this feature at any zoom level:
That's out of kilter with the feature's importance in the landscape and to those navigating that landscape (e.g. by foot). It would make sense on a cartography designed primarily for motorists or for urban areas, but osm.org's cartography has always been much richer than that. The osm-carto stylesheet can't show everything, but at z19, it can show a heck of a lot. [1] but then, opinions are like arseholes. |
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Never thought it should have been rendered in the first place. |
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2014-05-31 8:11 GMT+02:00 Mateusz Konieczny notifications@github.com:
this is indeed how the tag was defined some time ago: if there is |
Right. That's why I want to keep railway=abandoned in people's faces .... so they can look at it and think "hey, we ought to turn that into a trail." Once something disappears off the map, it can disappear from people's thinking. Of course, it also goes along that railways which don't exist any more should be tagged railway=dismantled. I agree totally with not rendering that on the main map. I think that most of the objections to rendering railway=abandoned are really objections to mis-tagged dismantled railways. E.g. as Andy pointed out above, there is no reason to render a railway diagonally across a housing estate where any trace of a railway was erased by bulldozers. And as Rovastar pointed out, the problem is handily solved by proper tagging, which he has done. I think this patch should be reversed, and instead we should embark on a campaign of tagging dismantled railways as such. |
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Hi Butrus, thanks for your comment. These were removed from this map style on purpose as described (at length) above. Of course they should be tagged in OSM, and I encourage you to do so, but they aren't going to be shown on this style. Other map styles are available which show these features. |
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gravitystorm: I understand that this change was on purpose but I want to vote against it. It is simply wrong to stop displaying some elements just because many of them are wrongly tagged in the database. As someone pointed above there are many examples of "abandoned railways" which serve no purpose today - they are just relicts from the past - and they deserve to be mapped properly in the OSM and be displayed in the default OSM style. |
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I wanted to say: there are many examples of "abandoned railways" which exist in the reality and serve no other purpose.... |
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Well, in Andy's defense (or defence (so Andy can have it spelled his way)), cartography consists of deciding what NOT to map. The principle that, at some zoom levels, abandoned railways should never ever be mapped, is beyond question. The real question is at what zoom level they should appear. Andy seems to be saying zoom=∞ and that's not a choice the ordinary person would make. |
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Displaying a Feature was always a very good way to force correct tagging. |
That worked well for the last 5 years with this tag didn't it. The community rushed to correct it. It is only now that the want to correct stuff as it has been removed. It works both ways. |
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"Speaking of openstreetmap Russ, what the heck happened to all of the abandoned right-of-ways that were so conveniently labeled on the map. It appears that they've all been removed, only active railroads remain labeled." |
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The trouble seems to be that railway=abandoned is not being used correctly. It is being used in places where railway=dismantled is more appropriate. So how about this plan: deprecate railway=abandoned, and start to render railway=railbed. So the proper tagging would be:
Using this scheme, all the railways going through shopping malls are gone, but editors can put back the railways which are rail-trails, embankments, cuts, bridges (that still exist), fencelines, shadows on aerial photos, or that annoying hump in the road. And a specialized render like openrailwaymaps.org can show the full extent of the railroad network because it's still there in the database as railway=dismantled or railway=abandoned. Is this a reasonable compromise position? |
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Tagging mailing list is probably better place to discuss a new tagging cheme. |
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Agree. The railway=railbed idea sounds sensible, but this is not the place to discuss it. |
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On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 4:50 AM, Russ Nelson notifications@github.com
Well, it looks like http://xkcd.com/927/ ;-) . But probably the best |
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railway=abandoned is tagged incorrectly, and the drastic solution of not rendering it at any zoom level has been implemented. No amount of pleading to restore them has worked. The question, then, is what kind of tagging WILL get rendered. There is no point in bringing this to the tagging list, because they will say that the existing tagging is perfectly fine, if people would only tag that way. Telling me to go away is simply not helpful. If you think railway=railbed should be rendered, say so. If you think railway=railbed should not be rendered, say so. Don't say that this is a tagging issue; it's not. It's a rendering issue. |
Are you sure? You make a good argument that the existing tagging is inconsistent, and should be changed. I like your idea of cleaning up the railway tagging. Your clarification of when to use railway=rail|disused|dismantled|railbed make a lot of sense, as does the depreciation of railway=abandoned. I believe the way to go is to put up a tagging proposal on the wiki and get it passed. Here, we can start thinking about a good rendering of railway=railbed, so that it can implemented quickly when the tagging is "official". |
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I've found a wiki page about the tags that are already used: But this really is better on a tagging list or proposal page... |
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I still think it is insignificant enough that we should not render it as nothing really exists. Feel free to discuss on the tagging list if you need need to improve the tagging. Tagging discussions are different to discussions on rendering and I cannot imagine there will any change to the rendering for this. |
I disagree, when there was a railway somewhere and the only intervention happening after closing the line was removing the actual rails (if at all), then there will be quite a lot of rail-related stuff remaining like embankments, cuttings, bridges, drainage, rail bed, potentially also a right of way / shapes of parcels, buildings, milestones, ... |
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On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 9:36 PM, dieterdreist notifications@github.com
I cannot agree more... |
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@Rovastar Yes, there will be a change in the rendering on this. There are more people made unhappy by it than are being made happy. The discussion here should be evidence of that. Before we start tagging for the renderer (every railroad is a track, innit?), let's figure out how we can render railbeds without having them be rendered where they don't exist. Railroads don't go through malls or through housing subdivisions, so let's fix that without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Please comment on my suggestion that railway=railbed should be rendered and railway=abandoned should not. Telling us to go away has already been rejected, and I cannot imagine that there will be any change to this. |
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I didn't merge this pull request by mistake, you know. I'm quite happy to leave rendering of the various abandoned/dismantled/razed/historic/obliterated railways to specialist railway renderings. The line used to be drawn between abandoned and dismantled, i.e. between
The gap between these does seem quite small! Anyway, I'm happy to draw the line at the lack of rails. Most people associate in-situ rails with railway, and lack of rails with being not-a-railway. If I see a railway on a map, I expect to see rails on the ground. If I see no rails, I don't expect it to be marked as a railway on a non-specialist map. As discussed elsewhere (e.g. #612 ) there can be significant physical features worth rendering that we don't render at the moment. However, this has little to do with their history and instead is to do with their current physical appearance. For example, an embankment is an embankment is an embankment - whether it was put there for a railway or an old road or as a defensive mound around a Roman encampment. There is no need (and in fact it is counterproductive) to keep dragging up this discussion whenever such things (embankments, cuttings, unused bridges etc) are being considered. Finally a short word on 'railbed' - such new tags should be discussed elsewhere, not here, but I should make it clear that if people start using 'railbed' instead of 'abandoned' (or as a sub-category of abandoned) it will not in itself make a difference to the situation - since of course the railbed vs dismantled proposal is exactly the same - and has the exact same deficiencies - as abandoned vs dismantled, just with a reshuffling of some ascii characters in the tags. |
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I understand why you threw the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe we can retrieve the baby before too much more harm comes to it? May I note again that both the OS and USGS render "Abandoned Railroads", which have no rails, on maps of sufficiently high detail? Your "rails on the ground" criteria is rejected by two highly regarded professional cartographic organizations. And the problem (as I have seen people note here) is that abandoned railways have been rendered over top of malls and housing developments. If that is indeed the problem, then let's fix THAT problem by marking those railways as dismantled and not rendered, AND LET'S START RENDERING THE OTHER RAILWAYS. I understand why you don't want to revert this patch, because that 1) gives us no incentive to fix the tagging, and 2) because it would re-create the railways-over-malls problem. You seem to reject the idea that abandoned railways should be rendered, and point to #612. But that is only a problem because YOU STOPPED RENDERING THE RAILWAY BRIDGES. So maybe you could point to a different problem that is not one of your own creating? |
Note that in many cases these would not have "mostly all" evidence removed, but would no longer have any evidence, and should be deleted outright or moved to a historical map. I stay uninvolved in issues of cartography like this since it's not my area, but this is the only issue I've turned off notifications for. |
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I'm going to give up at this point, because Andy has said pretty definitively that he's not giving an inch. |
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FWIW, I agree with @gravitystorm as to which physical features should be rendered by this style (regardless of how they are tagged). The discussion has been muddled by arguing about the finer tagging nuances and imbroglios, but "thankfully" all those nuances only concern objects that the maintainers do not want to render. The issue of render-worthy objects (bridges, embankments, etc) not being rendered anymore because of this change is a separate one. See #612 for bridges, I don't know what the status of others are. |
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"Hey Russ, What happened to openstreetmap.com? It appears that all of the abandoned railroads are no longer labeled on the map. Is there a certain setting I need to enable in order to view the abandoned lines now, or have they been removed? It's been almost impossible and extremely hard to trace NY's abandoned without the help of O.S.M. Do you know what happened to them? -Michael Colangelo This is an example of the cost of this change. Does anybody have any examples of the benefit? Has anybody said "Oh gosh, I'm glad that I don't see abandoned railroads anymore?" |
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But hmmmm.... in an attempt to answer Michael's question, I tried setting my 'Layer' to a non-default layer, e.g. Mapquest or Humanitarian. Both of them render abandoned railroads. If you have made this change in your browser, it is the new default. So when you visit one of the URLs that I have sprinkled all over the Internet that cites a specific railway, people who follow that link will get to a map rendering that includes the abandoned railroad. YAY! |
Since I don't see this closed issue as being productive anymore, I'm going to go ahead and lock it. |
Per the wiki, railway=abandoned is used for railways where the rails have
been removed. See also the picture on the wiki:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:railway%3Dabandoned
Such abandoned railways should probably not be rendered on a general purpose
map.
This resolves #3332 on trac.