Country-specific crossing presets

[osmuser63783]

Hi, I am opening this issue here to get maintainer feedback before I put in the work to create a pull request.

There are only a few different crossing types in the UK and there’s a desire in the UK community for more specific presets. Mappers take issue with the generic “marked crosswalk” preset which sets crossing:markings=yes. If I type in “zebra crossing” then I should be shown a zebra crossing preset, and that should populate all the right tags.

Now as far as I understand, there used to be a zebra crossing preset that would add crossing=zebra but the US version of iD called it “marked crosswalk”, and the US has all sorts of crossing markings, so this led to the crossing=zebra tag being used, confusingly, for all sorts of marked crossings, whether they had zebra markings or not. I would want to avoid repeating this. 
It seems the solution is region- or country-specific presets.

I brought up the idea in the UK community subform, here and here, and it generally got positive feedback.

If you think this idea is worth pursuing (& has a chance of being merged), then I could start working on a bunch of UK-specific presets that would look a bit like this, but I’d discuss the specific tags with the community. The generic marked crossing preset could even be disabled in the UK.

[tordans]

@tyrasd what are your thoughts on adding about 6 GB specific crossing presets to the mix? Personally I don't like the idea due to the huge complexity those country filter create and those crossings will be quite specific. On the other hand, I don't see how the current setup could work for those country specific needs. The most pressing issue I see in starting adding country specific presets is, that we set a precedence for other countries to ask for something similar, which IMO the current setup does not support (in terms of complexity).

Another way to handle this would be to have iD support generic fields only and ask local communities to setup documentation how how to apply the fields to fit into the local crossing categories. That would work for the given tags in the link above except for the crossing_ref. But adding crossing_ref for only a few countries would be a lot less complex that separate crossing presets…

@1ec5 you where active in the forum as well, any thoughts on this?

[1ec5]

The forum discussions led to the creation of “Crossings in the United Kingdom” on the wiki. Multiple participants from the UK contributed to this page, which ultimately came to recommend crossing_ref=* in addition to the usual global crossing tags. The UK’s zoo animals are so entrenched that I think country-specific presets make more sense there than in any other country. In other countries, the crossing “types” amount to ergonomic shortcuts for mappers, rather than a firm distinction in the real world.

[tordans]

I am assuming the wiki page talks about the crossing node on the centerline, right? What would the corresponding tagging for the separately mapped highway look like?
It would be helpful for me, if the wiki page got another column to describe those tags.

When I reworked the crossing presets and fields recently I added some docs at https://github.com/openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema/tree/main/data/presets/highway/crossing to remember where which part is located in the repo.

The UK’s zoo animals are so entrenched that I think country-specific presets make more sense there than in any other country.

Thanks for that insight!

I would still like to try out to only add a crossing_ref field for GB only to the presets (at the top of the preset), ideally with smart defaults depending on the selected preset. That would not prevent mappers from adding illogical combinations of tags (as a propper preset would) but it I think we might be able to add this quickly as a first step to get visibility to the crossing_ref tag. If we where to stop here, some QA processes could make sure the sub-tags are in line with the selected crossing_ref.

For this to happen, a good first step would be to take the existing crossing presets for nodes and ways and list them here and list which crossing_ref values should be allows/available per preset.