[Voting] Feature Proposal - Deprecate crossing=zebra in favor of crossing:markings

[Nadjita]

@Minh_Nguyen

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that these two approaches are mutually exclusive. crossing_ref=zebra seems to be the most informative tag for a zebra crossing in the UK, but other secondary keys can serve as a backstop for less sophisticated data consumers. To me, there’s little harm in allowing these other keys to be used in combination on a best-effort basis.

I complete agree, especially considering that in the US, it varies from state to state. Sometimes it’s easier to map “a zebra crossing”, and sometimes it’s easier to map “zebra stripes on the ground”. The same goes for “A shared bicycle and pedestrian lane” in contrast to “red painting on the left side of the way”. Person A might know what it stands for, person B might only know what it looks like. Someone might then, later on combine all this into the common tagging of that situation.

@Minh_Nguyen

even if the authors of the TSRGD or Highway Code decide tomorrow that zebra crossings shall be rainbow-colored, they cannot magically cause rainbow paint to be splattered upon all the country’s zebras overnight

This is a good example why it’s so complicated to come up with templates in OSM: you never know which part of the template changes: the visible, or the invisible part.

The invisble part is “pedestrians have the right of way, bicyclists have to unmount and push their bike. Cars have to approach carefully. Pedestrians are not allowed to cross the road on any other place if they are within 40m of a zebra crossing. You are also not allowed to park 10m before or after a zebra crossing”

The visible part is: “there are white zebra stripes on the carriageway, plus sign X, plus criss-cross zig-zags, glitter an whatnot”.

So, ideally, people would never have to “map” the invisble template, but leave these rules in the wiki or whereever, whereas the visible part(s) can definitely be mapped if people want to, and should maybe be part of an editor template. The invisble bits, could simply change overnight, and a lot of people either don’t know, or don’t care about these.

All in all, it seems that there is a need for templates, both in OSM and the editors, and maybe for country-specific prefixes for some of them. In general, being a geo database, these prefixes should be inferable from the surrounding administrative borders, but again, it might be preferable to tag crossing_ref=UK:zebra for a zebra crossing based on the UK template just to be 100% specific. Maybe it’s even time to abandon crosing_ref and switch to a :template suffix to store these, so we could later on apply the same MO to other things than mere crossings. crossing:template=UK:zebra doesn’t even look half as bad as I feared. I’m just spitballing some ideas, I’m in no position to enforce any of this. But I’m happy someone finally brought the whole discussion to live, even though the proposal, as it stands, it very likely goinf to be rejected.