Proposal talk:Freight Terminal

What terminals

• terminal=* : unclear it's for freight. Can't it be passenger, or bus? Or for power=terminal ?
  • → freight_terminal=*
• cargo=passenger : Why should this be kept?

Kovposch (talk) 20:01, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

I have debated both. The current reason I picked just terminal without freight is because adding freight almost felt redundant. Most other meanings for terminal are in completely different fields. And I aligned with how terminal is used for airports.

In the same way I've kept passengers and that's why I dropped the freight notation as well. The most general meaning of a terminal is where stuff (freight or people) is coming together to move from one transport mode to another. In this sense bus stops and ferry terminals are good examples. You could exclude them from this proposal, but the reality is that ferry terminals and cruise terminals often occur close to freight terminals. It would be weird to not have the ferry and cruise terminals under the terminal tagging rules.

That said, there are arguments for both. Adding freight to the name would also make a clearer distinction between freight transshipments and people terminals (e.g. ferry, cruise, bus). It all depends on where we want to draw the scope.

There is a big need for freight shipping terminal tagging. Maybe less so to include other terminals in here. If that is the general feel, we can drop the passenger scope and switch to a full freight branding.

Then it would become freight_terminal=yes. It would also become industrial=freight_terminal and it would link better with freight:mode=etc (see that further discussion below). Takje (talk) 07:17, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

The modes

• freight:mode=*
  • *=barge vs *=short_sea vs *=deep_sea shouldn't be distinguished at top-level. This is inconsistent with other modes, and makes querying more complicated. Barges are also used for coastal. Grouping coastal and intra-continental together is too wide.
    • → freight:mode=waterborne + freight:mode:waterborne=*
  • I do like it, but is freight:mode=* necessary? Is freight=* used for anything now? railway:freight=* seems another undiscussed ORM invention. It's the same as *cargo=*
  • But should semicolon be used, and is inventing this necessary? Can we reuse modes, to have ship=yes (+ barge=yes etc) + aircraft=yes + hgv=yes + train=yes , if not freight:*=yes suffixing?

Kovposch (talk) 20:05, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

• Regarding the split in waterborne top level and deep dive, this sounds like a reasonable change in the proposal. Could you give some references to other articles using this scheme? Waterborne gave many results on the wiki, but I couldn't immediately find it as a key or a value.
• I initially had transport_mode as a key, rather than freight:mode. I decided against it due to it being too generic. Freight alone misses the point that it is a mode and with just freight, it could almost replace cargo rather than the modes. Modes by itself was also too generic. That's why I picked freight:mode. But open for other arguments or suggestions.
• There is no hard reason to pick the semicolon standard over the boolean standard. I had initially put the boolean standard, but decided against it because it pollutes the namespace a bit further and there was no immediate need for further specifying these values (e.g. freight:mode:road:??=). But happy to change this based on other arguments.
• The suggested keys ( ship=yes (+ barge=yes etc) + aircraft=yes + hgv=yes + train=yes) could be an option. They are mainly used for access-based permissions. The difference is that the access-based scheme is a lot wider than the proposed modes. A mode is rail, which could work for trains, but in theory also for other rail-based modes. For shipping, this distinction also solidifies your suggestion to map waterborne separate from barge/deep_sea/short_sea. Maybe that's where we need to go. We tag mode road/rail/water/air in combination with vehicle-based access modes to distinguish between barge/deep_sea.
• Which brings me to the next point about barge versus deep_sea. Often, it is immediately clear if a terminal offers one or the other. If the terminal is located at a canal, it will be too small for deep sea ships. If it is a deep sea terminal, they often do both and you can look simply at the size of the docked ships to distinguish between both. The size is the main way to differentiate and that is also the way in which the AIS (shipment electronic system) differentiates both. Barges have separate categories from oceanbound ships.
• The difference between short sea and deep sea is less clear. Sometimes the same ship can do 6 months of short sea traffic and 6 months of deep sea traffic. It might be more useful in the future to track types of ships (e.g. container ships versus tanker ships). But here we arrive exactly at the access based parameters. A terminal might be waterborne, but has only access for barges. Another might have access for barges and deep sea vessels but not for tankers. But I want to avoid scope creep for this proposal. The initial goal was to have a tag for terminals and allow a way to tag cargo processing and modes.

Based on these discussions, here is a new improved proposal. What do you think?

freight:mode:road=yes/no

freight:mode:water=yes/no

freight:mode:water:barge=yes/no

freight:mode:water:sea=yes/no

freight:mode:rail=yes/no

freight:mode:air=yes/no Takje (talk) 10:44, 15 April 2026 (UTC)