Render railway:track_ref value as railway label when name is absent

[Lispach]

Hello, there.

Currently, only the value of name is rendered for railway labels. However, in most railway stations, what is used as the name of tracks is, in fact, their ref inside the station, which is stored in railway:track_ref. For instance, in France, a track in a station is designated Voie 1, which means track 1; this designation is, in fact, the reference of the track, which is to be recorded as railway:track_ref=1, not as name=Voie 1.

The problem with the current rendering is that it brings users to store what is used as the name, but which is in fact the track ref, as name=Voie 1 and not railway:track_ref=1, which essentially encourages contributors to mistag the track ref as name=Voie 1. That mistagging encouragement could be avoided if railway:track_ref was the second choice for the label of railways, after name: if name exists, its value is used for the label; if no name tag is present, but if a railway:track_ref is present, then its value would be used for the label. This way, contributors would not be tempted to mistag the track ref as name, and these refs (over 90.000 railways tagged with railway:track_ref, about the half without a name tag) would be rendered, improving rendering of railway station tracks.

Regards.

[jeisenbe]

Thank you for opening this issue, @Lispach, and welcome!

See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:railway:track_ref

Also mentioned briefly in table at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:railway, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:service and https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRailwayMap/Tagging

It appears that this key is used heavily in a few countries, but not globally: most usage is in central Europe, especially France, Germany, Poland, Finland, and a few neighboring countries. It's used in Japan and South Korea, but only rarely, and in the USA and Australia there is only usage in a couple of places. There are no uses in Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, Central America, and only a handful in Canada, South America and East Asia:

https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/NDk - France, 28k
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/ND2 - Germany, 15k
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/ND9 - Switzerland 12k
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/NDn - Finland 8k
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/NDp - United States 8k
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/NDg - Austria 7k
These 6 countries add up to 78k uses, which is over 85% of the total.

(I'm surprised the USA showed up on the list, because the map shows the tag is only widely used in California and a couple other places)

The next highest, Russia, has 2.3k uses.

It would be good to see it used in more places before we started rendering this feature.

This style tries to represent the global diversity of OpenStreetMap, so tags that are used in many different places are more likely to be rendered than those that are limited to a few countries.

I think it would be good to discuss this tag further, perhaps on the public transit mailing list, or the general Tagging list. Ask what are people in other countries, like the UK, Italy, India, China, Argentina etc using for this instead: name=* or ref=* or something else?

[jragusa]

This would increase cluttering in train station area since name tag of railway=platform is also rendered and there is the same discussion between name and ref tags for the latter (#3271).

Please note also that name of railway track is already rendered which may increase confusion. Nevertheless, a discussion about the priority between platform and rail label rendering would be a good starting point. Note also that platform are better spaced than rail and this increase their readability.

[jeisenbe]

@Lispach did you have a chance to discuss this further?

"I think it would be good to discuss this tag further, perhaps on the public transit mailing list, or the general Tagging list. Ask what are people in other countries, like the UK, Italy, India, China, Argentina etc using for this instead: name=* or ref=* or something else?"

[Lispach]

@jeisenbe I did not; my planning, and my brain, are currently a bit overstuffed, so I would have trouble to correctly start and follow the discussion, for now. I'll try later, when I'll have more free time and brain to do more than quick contributions.

[Anakin86]

Ask what are people in other countries, like the UK, Italy, India, China, Argentina etc using for this instead: name=* or ref=* or something else?

Good morning!

I think, I can answer this question right now. Tag trackref=* is described in OpenRailwayMap schema tagging. The point is that ref tag refers to entire railway line, and trackref - to particular path only. Eventually all tracks numbers should migrate to trackref, and ref will be filled only in part of countries, where railway lines also have specifid numbers.

So I agree that it's a good idea to render trackref for tracks, because it's more correct tag for this stuff.

[Elefant-aus-Wuppertal]

Even though I like this propose, I think solving #3271 would have preference first, because there would be maybe more use for the genereal public.