User talk:Rurseekatze/Station Importance Draft

Passenger count instead?

This is still quite German-centric - you're giving nicknames to the Bahnhofskategorie, and it is unclear whether Paris's Gare du Nord or Gare de l'Est would get priority, or what classification Monaco's one train station or Luxembourg's central train station would get.

Key:population is used by the French style to decide whether to show small commune names. Could passengers=<count> be used in a similar way?

More info (in French): [1] [2]

--Stereo (talk) 12:33, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

No, these categories are not just nicknames to the German "Bahnhofskategorie". The mentioned equivalent "Bahnhofskategorie" is just an example, but there is no rule that a station with Bahnhofskategorie x must have importance=* – often it is the case, but it does not have to.

I think that using a tag like passengers=* is not feasible. How will you collect the data? There is no possibility for a mapper to check the validity of the value. For bigger stations, you could find this data in their Wikipedia articles, but for smaller ones? Also this value does not indicates the importance – there might be subway stations in asian megacities that have more passengers per day than central stations in some european countries. The number of passengers is a absolute value, but what we need here is the relative importance, compared to the rest of the network and neighbour stations.

I would tag both Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est as importance=continental. I think this is a special case where you have two important stations in a relatively short distance. If you just compare the stations of Paris, their importance is different, but if you look at the whole network of France or Middle Europe, their importance is equal. In cases like this it might be thinkable to use passengers=* as an additional information for decision, but as I said before, passengers=* is not feasible as the primary source of categorization.

Monaco should be tagged as importance=regional, even when it is a capital city. But from railway view it is part of the French railway network and compared to Nice it is just a station of regional importance. It is part of the long-distance network, but has only a few long-distance trains in addition to the regional traffic. This station is not relevant for passengers without the destination of Monaco or neighbourhood. Small countries such as Monaco were the reason for removing that stuff of international traffic from the proposal.

Luxembourg Central Station should be tagged as either importance=continental or importance=interregional. I do not know the traffic situation of the station, so it is difficult for me to decide for one of these categories.

Note that the boundaries between these categories are fluid, similar to road tagging, so there is no right or wrong. --rurseekatze (talk) 14:36, 11 March 2016 (UTC)