Talk:Tag:railway=tram stop

Difference with "halt"? And what about one-way stops?

Two issues:

• It should be explained more clearly what's the difference between "tram stop" and Tag:railway=halt, and both of them should be linked to in the same places.

I don't understand this difference either. I only know about halts and stations for trains, trams, subway, light_rail, and bus.

A halt is always a place where the vehicle halts to pick up passengers and a station is a place that is the same as a halt, but where also personnel is present and where vehicles that are not in use are stationed.

There is absolutely no need to use different names because the nodes are always part of a way or relation, it only adds to the confusion. --Skratz 16:06, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

• As User:Tkadlubo has written below, there are situations (e.g. in Poland) where tram stops for trams going in opposite directions are in different places. How can that be marked on the map? I thought that the tram railways going in both directions could be drawn separately, but that would pose a problem if the railway overlaps the street (see: TramTrails), as the railway is then marked just as a tag of the street. --Akavel 00:16, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Halts don't go anywhere, so no direction should be tagged. Which halt you need to take depends on the vehicles route, routes are tagged using relations. --Skratz 16:06, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

Relation to Public Transport schema

How does this tag relate to the Public Transport schema, which specifies public_transport=stop_position? So this tag here is obsolete? --Rohieb (talk) 23:43, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

As long as most renderers only support PTv1 I'd suggest tagging tram_stop and stop_position in parallel. --Jojo4u (talk) 08:04, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

meaning of "where the stop is located"

For me stop (if mapped as node) "is located" at place where passengers are waiting. But there is also interpretation (https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/1491#issuecomment-221877441) that node should be located at rails.

It would be useful to clarify how it is supposed to be mapped (or at least, how it is typically mapped) Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 08:43, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

"How to map" has been "in a way tagged with railway=tram" since the beginning in 2009. This definition came naturally:

• One reason to invent this tag was to support stops which are some meters apart - which railway=halt with one node per stop does not capture well.
• Most discussion was about whether renderers could deduce the type of stop from the way the node is sitting at.

I think you see this from the wrong end: bus_stop is defined besides the way because "This easily captures the important information about which side of the road the bus stop is on." (see 2008). The "waiting area" definition came later in 2013.

--Jojo4u (talk) 11:49, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

I reworked the article.--Jojo4u (talk) 12:30, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

"where the halt resembles more a tram stop than a railway halt"

There needs to be a list of ways in which a halt can "resemble more a tram stop than a railway halt." Among other things, this should include

• close proximity between stops (at or around 300 meters)
• single-direction stops (where a rider would need to walk to another block to board a trolley going the opposite direction)
• sidewalks as curb-aligned platforms
• low level of physical separation between the tracks and the road at the platform
  • this requires some interpretation
• names derived from intersections (i.e. "South Boulevard at 14th Street")
• clear bounds of the stop area
  • "light rail station" implies a facility with a clear entrance and exit.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Colgza (talk • contribs)

I think that it isn't appropriate to try to define a distinction between stations, halts, and tram stops on a national or worldwide level, unless all the passenger rail systems in a country operate the same way. Currently, each transit system in the US has its own definition for halt or tram stop where applicable. You could summarize them vaguely as, say, "minor stations with a lower level of service than a typical station", but the specifics are all over the place. A halt or tram stop might be a non-accessible request-only stop on a light rail line built off a legacy streetcar system, like with the San Francisco Muni or the Pittsburgh T. On Amtrak, it could be a seasonal station open only during festivals, or a non-scheduled station requiring group reservations, or just a request stop.

If we're going to come up with a more specific definition for halts and tram stops, we should start by documenting existing usage and the decisions behind it. Perhaps we could build a table of US transit systems and their tagging schemes before exploring how to change them. clay_c (talk) 18:39, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

My problem with extending upon the "existing usage" of railway=station/halt/tram_stop in America is irrational. We apply station to everything from Amtrak express stations to MUNI light-rail stops, and the map is cluttered because of it. I know that rendering isn't supposed to determine how we tag, but the sheer clutter that can be seen in Portland OR should at least indicate to us that the way we are doing things is wrong. (I don't even understand why station is the default. It's not like there's anything wrong with a system having only halts). Colgza (talk) 16:11, 29 June 2021 (UTC)