I've driven on this highway. If I'm planning a route through the Eastern Sierras, it's helpful for me to know which parts are expressway-grade vs. two-lane road so I know where I'll have chances to pass slower vehicles.

Honestly dude, did you learn anything at all from the last time you got banned for doing this?

I concur with jmapb here. Public transit stops in the United States are commonly named after street corners. Occasionally they may be named after an address, a landmark, or a transportation hub. But I've never seen any system where stops are named after the routes that stop there.

Please put information on routes that stop there into the route_ref=* tag. The name=* tag is not the proper place for this. The nonstandard schema you've introduced makes it harder to keep route relations sorted and maintained, as many bus stops with previously unique names are now duplicates of each other. If you wish to see an OpenStreetMap renderer that highlights bus routes, I recommend you go to the Layers menu on the right and switch to Transport Map or ÖPNVKarte.

Fluffy has been making large-scale edits to reclassify roadways around the country, ignoring the local community. These edits are safe to revert. osm.org/user_blocks/3918

osm.org/changeset/90059286

Hi there. I reverted this changeset because it created a gap in the boundary between Wayne and Union Counties. Please be careful in the future not to accidentally change an administrative boundary when you're trying to edit something else.

osm.org/changeset/91055314

This was a while ago, I don't even remember. I'm cool if you reclassify it.

Hi Andy. As I was reviewing Metra stations to repair stop positions and get things back to a working state, I noticed details were added in the same changesets where the stop positions were deleted. While some of the information was added in good faith and was useful, much of it was complaints about other mappers' opinions. Many of the stop positions that remained undeleted were given a fixme=* or note=* complaining that it was fake. I had a hard time sifting through the good and the bad, and in the interest of adding stop positions back and keeping tags free of interpersonal drama, I reverted them.

I appreciate attempts to add more detail to train stations, especially as public transit mapping and railway mapping in the United States have been gaining ground lately. I invite the author of the changesets complaining about and deleting my work to respectfully join in on the discussion as we continue to develop a tagging scheme for stop positions. He's clearly interested in improving railway data and I feel he could use some guidance from the community. I just wish he wouldn't be so hostile to everyone who bumps into him.

Manual. I'm using aerial imagery and doing a little internet research to determine whether places tagged as railway=station are actually disused, as well as creating station nodes wherever railway=station is erroneously tagged on a building (should usually be retagged building=train_station).

Feel free to survey the stop positions and add them. This is valuable information and people would definitely appreciate it if you could add it in.

If you don't feel like doing this work, that's fine—just leave the stop_position nodes as they are and move on to mapping something else.

Hi there. I went ahead and reverted this in changeset 87052754. If you have more accurate information on where trains stop, feel free to add more nodes and move the existing nodes to where they should be. Otherwise, it's okay to leave it as it is.

osm.org/changeset/87052754

JOSM crashed during conflict resolution here. Hopefully I got everything straightened out but if anyone comes across anything fishy, let me know.

Thanks for pointing out the subway_entrance discrepancy—it should be fixed now.

Stations lacking free transfer between directions are typically not found at transfer hubs. Bleecker Street (6) used to be an exception, where the southbound platform connected to Broadway–Lafayette Street (B,D,F,M) but the northbound platform was isolated from the rest of the station complex until recent renovations established a connection. Nearly all other split stations are somewhere in between train/subway transfers, so the most probable transfers happening at these places would be to and from buses on the surface.

Which brings me to pedestrian routing, the original reason I split these stations into separate stop_area relations. If you're riding the NYC Subway for the first time (like I was a few years ago), you might enter the station you're looking for and find out that you need to exit and re-enter, paying additional fare. It's improbable, probably nonexistent, that a routing algorithm would actually direct someone to make this sort of opposite-direction transfer. So I think it's sensible to add stop_area_group relations, though personally I'd only add them if there's nearby stop_area relations for buses.

Hi there. I noticed you added stop_area_group relations to encapsulate the subway stations I've split into separate directions due to lack of in-station transfer between the two platforms. These are stations where one must exit, cross the street, and pass through a different entrance (paying additional fare) to change to the opposite direction. So I deliberately left them without stop_area_group relations.

Should these be grouped together if there is no free transfer between them? I sometimes come across relations like this one [1] where someone has explicitly marked that stations without free transfers are not to be grouped. The wiki doesn't have straightforward guidelines on what a stop_area_group relation is intended for, so I guess this is subjective.

Perhaps a relation grouping by itself isn't enough to denote a free transfer and might necessitate a tag on the stop_area_group. I just want to make sure we're mapping things consistently going forward.

[1] osm.org/relation/9813444

Good work! Don't forget to change the from=* and to=* tags on the bus route to reflect what you've changed.

The beginning and end of a roundtrip route should match up with where the driver lays over and takes a break. For the free Peninsula commuter shuttles, typically this happens at the train station rather than the workplaces. If you're sure the layover spot is at that office building, then the relation is good as it is, otherwise I'd recommend changing it to start and end at Mountain View Transit Center.

You're probably right. Feel free to change it back.

Ah, good point. Do what you want with it - I'm gonna be taking a break for about a week to help with family stuff

Not really sure. It was there before I edited it and I didn't want to remove it as I split the route into its constituent parts. All the stations are mapped in detail now, so it can probably be removed.

Different train operators often have different names for the same station. Amtrak refers to the same station as just "Denver, Colorado" with "Union Station" as a subtitle, as is common with other major central stations around the country: https://www.amtrak.com/stations/den.html

Also, the Wikipedia article has it named this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Union_Station

Of course, most other union stations are officially called just "Union Station" as well. But they're typically tagged with name="[city] Union Station" to avoid adding ambiguity in the national network. A train route may pass through multiple union stations, so it'd be frustrating to work on keeping the route relations sorted without having names be nationally unique.

To this end, I typically tag the building itself as close to the official name as possible. So in this case I'd have the historic train hall be named "Union Station". Sometimes I might even add the building's name to the label node (i.e. railway=station) under alt_name to help people find it with Nominatim, like Icicle Station in Leavenworth, WA: osm.org/node/6997575339

But the label node could just as well just be named "Denver"! Of course, there are other railway stations in Denver, so that doesn't help data consumers disambiguate. If you choose to change the name back, please make sure people can still search for it by keeping "Denver Union Station" in another tag, such as alt_name or nat_name.

Best,

Clay