[openrailwaymap] Re: Using pzb and lzb absence for "no train protection"

On 2020-05-31 21:04, JJJ Wegdam via Openrailwaymap wrote: > Dear ORM community, > > As far as I know, the signalling layer renders train protection > absence as soon as a way contains railway:pzb=no and railway:lzb=no. I > implemented this throughout over 10 European countries. A user from > Belgium is now complaining about this. He argues that Belgium doesn't > have the PZB nor the LZB system anywhere in the country and that thus > these tags should not be in the country. Could you please provide your > thoughts on this complaint? You can contribute to the discussion at > https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/85628039#map=13/50.8173/4.3336 > or reply to this email. I agree completely that you should not tag railway:pzb=no or railway:lzb=no in countries where there is no PZB or LZB. There is no default saying that having no train protection tags means it has PZB or LZB. Even in countries using PZB or LZB it should be considered superfluous to tag this since the default is no. Also tags like railway:etcs=no and railway:tbl=no that are still on some ways there I would like to disencourage very much. The default is no, so you don't have to tag that it is not there. It I look at the openrailwaymap signalling layer it says "no information" or "no protection" or PZB/ATB/LZB/ETCS. I assume that the renderer knows which tags are for train protection (a bad scheme IMHO, see 1) below) and only renders lines without any of those systems as "no information" and renders lines without PZB/ATB/LZB/ETCS as "no protection". If that is so then the solution is easy: change the legend tag "no protection" to "other train protection". And "no information" should be "no protection" if there is no positive tag saying there is train protection. Sure, you will have a lot of false negatives, but people will notice and will amend the tags. I wholeheartedly agree with Eimai. Do not go out and tag all the railway lines in the world with railway:pzb=no and/or railway:lzb=no just to get that map looking like you want to. He is right, this is tagging for the renderer. I see an area around Laon as well: railway:etcs=no, railway:kvb=no, railway:lzb=no, railway:pzb=no. Come one. There are 60 other train protection tags, add them as well, or why not? 1) It should be more like railway:train_protection:pzb=yes/no. Why is railway:pzb a train protection tag and railway:gnt not. This makes automation around these tags very difficult. When you add a new train protection tag, the program needs to know about it. If you use railway:train_protection:xyz, then everything starting with railway:train_protection: is about train protection, and if you don't recognize the type, then you know it is "other" for your purposes. If you add railway:xyz as a new train protection tag, you have to reprogram everything that is working with these tags. Maarten