Talk:Key:capacity:persons
Latest comment: 8 days ago by 99 tabazan in topic Non-organic use of ranges
It should be allowed for (route) relations
The idea is that certain bus routes deploy minibuses which can carry only a certain amount of people and is explicitly mentioned so on the timetable. (See these routes I've edited.)
- Capacity of service is a multiplication product of vehicle capacity and frequency.
aerialway=*usesaerialway:capacity=*, and a confusingly-namedaerialway:occupancy=*separately.
—— Kovposch (talk) 03:31, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
Non-organic use of ranges
From a quick glance, it seems like the currently most popular tag values that use ranges instead of simple numbers are not representative of the organic use of this tag. See e.g. https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2y44 for a location where such a tag is used extensively, but with questionable data quality.
Does it therefore really make sense to document such values as valid cases for this tag? -- Tyr (talk) 15:19, 29 October 2026 (UTC)
- Can't the maximum be a range? 99 tabazan (talk) 16:01, 29 October 2026 (UTC)
- Maybe? I'm not saying it can't… But such changes to the meaning/contents of a tag should be discussed and decided by the larger community before documenting it, shouldn't they? Especially when it's not something that's been (organically) "in use". -- Tyr (talk) 19:05, 29 October 2026 (UTC)
- The illustration has a sign "maximum capacity".
- We try to describe the current use of the tag. You seem to have other cases in mind. Can you describe them and give a sample for each? 99 tabazan (talk) 19:09, 29 October 2026 (UTC)
- The illustration would be simply tagged as capacity:persons=300 of course. What I think is not a suitable usage of the tag is (for example) capacity:persons=100-250 on a building like https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/565023026, because those numbers are most likely in almost all cases completely unverifiable on the ground. Further it is also not even clear what such a range is even supposed to mean: is that building sometimes only fitting 100 people, some other days 250? Or is it up to 250 teenagers, but only max. 100 adults? Or is it meant that the occupancy is not allowed to go lower than 100? Or does it depend on how the location is used, etc.? -- Tyr (talk) 21:27, 29 October 2026 (UTC)
- To summarize, there are 3 aspects:
- Is it a maximum?
- Can the value be a range? In places where this isn't signed, surveying it at 250-300 may be more accurate than writing 300. Even when it's signed "300" adding 250-300 may be sufficiently precise and less likely to be revised.
- What's the meaning of ranges in Bali?
- You seem to be concerned mostly about that last one. Sometimes there are tags that nobody can explain (or the mapper who could is gone) and we just need to acknowledge this. Sample: Tag:scale=0.2 (also at Key:scale). You could ask at https://c.osm.org/c/communities/id/58 about Bali to investigate the tags. --99 tabazan (talk) 22:16, 29 October 2026 (UTC)
- Documenting such bogus tag values as a (likely) mistake is of course fine, as it was done in the wiki page for the "scale" tag. But the page here does currently the opposite: it falsely endorses tag values that don't make sense. --Tyr (talk) 17:46, 30 October 2026 (UTC)
- I did some digging and checked the tags: most values are ranges and I don't think this is limited to Bali. The page doesn't endorse anything on Bali. 99 tabazan (talk) 19:21, 30 October 2026 (UTC)
- That surprises me a bit: I did also research the usage of the tag, and come to the opposite conclusion: the vast majority of cases where this tag includes a range value are questionable mass-edits. I only found a small percentage of (semi-)legitimate uses like https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/12473685943/ (where the capacity depends on the weather conditions, but even that might be better represented as something in the spirit of
capacity:persons=8 + capacity:persons:conditional=4 @ bad-weather). PS: Why are you talking about Bali? The example I gave above is not even in Bali (but instead on the island of Java), but the problematic tag usage is of course not limited to Indonesia, as it was just an example to illustrate the problematic data that can also be found elsewhere.-- Tyr (talk) 10:25, 31 October 2026 (UTC)- Yes, it should read "Java" instead of "Bali". I added some statistics to the page.
- Maybe HOT used the tag, but Humanitarian_OSM_Tags/HDM_preset only lists capacity.
- The general problem of the tag is that its meaning can vary depending on the feature it is applied to. That some mappers use it wrongly isn't really specific to this tag.
- How exactly do you think the page should be revised to reflect current use better? 99 tabazan (talk) 16:47, 31 October 2026 (UTC)
- That surprises me a bit: I did also research the usage of the tag, and come to the opposite conclusion: the vast majority of cases where this tag includes a range value are questionable mass-edits. I only found a small percentage of (semi-)legitimate uses like https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/12473685943/ (where the capacity depends on the weather conditions, but even that might be better represented as something in the spirit of
- I did some digging and checked the tags: most values are ranges and I don't think this is limited to Bali. The page doesn't endorse anything on Bali. 99 tabazan (talk) 19:21, 30 October 2026 (UTC)
- Documenting such bogus tag values as a (likely) mistake is of course fine, as it was done in the wiki page for the "scale" tag. But the page here does currently the opposite: it falsely endorses tag values that don't make sense. --Tyr (talk) 17:46, 30 October 2026 (UTC)
- To summarize, there are 3 aspects:
- The illustration would be simply tagged as capacity:persons=300 of course. What I think is not a suitable usage of the tag is (for example) capacity:persons=100-250 on a building like https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/565023026, because those numbers are most likely in almost all cases completely unverifiable on the ground. Further it is also not even clear what such a range is even supposed to mean: is that building sometimes only fitting 100 people, some other days 250? Or is it up to 250 teenagers, but only max. 100 adults? Or is it meant that the occupancy is not allowed to go lower than 100? Or does it depend on how the location is used, etc.? -- Tyr (talk) 21:27, 29 October 2026 (UTC)
- Maybe? I'm not saying it can't… But such changes to the meaning/contents of a tag should be discussed and decided by the larger community before documenting it, shouldn't they? Especially when it's not something that's been (organically) "in use". -- Tyr (talk) 19:05, 29 October 2026 (UTC)