new operator category for highways and train tracks

[wvanderp]

I did an overpass query for operators without operator:wikidata in my local area, and many railways and highways came up.

As often before, it did not show a message in the ID to add the operator wiki data, so they might not have been added to the repo. But there is no category for highways and railways at all.

Some things to think about:

• do we have separate files for all types of highways, or can we do this on a key basis?

Please let me know if there is any desire for this, and if so, I'm happy to try to create a pull request.

examples

The Dutch Department of Transport is responsible for all highways.

highway=motorway
operator=Rijkswaterstaat
operator:wikidata=Q1408870

Dutch provinces are responsible for all primary highways.

highway=primary
operator=Provincie Drenthe
operator:wikidata=Q772

And pro-rail owns and maintains all railways.

railway=rail
operator=ProRail
operator:wikidata=Q2316882

[bhousel]

#4768 has some ideas about how we could add highway to this index - it would be great to get all the Road Routes included along with who operates them.

For railway=rail, this isn't a tag we have yet, but it seems like we do have stuff under https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index/tree/main/data/operators/route that might fit. Maybe it's more common to add the operator tag to the route than the individual rail ways, I'm not sure.

[AntiCompositeNumber]

Highway

I agree that it would be useful to include highway route and feature operators in NSI.

Route operators would be fairly simple. While there is some overlap with network, there are many circumstances where a specific route is operated by someone other than the main network operator, such as for many toll roads in the US. taginfo says that 8% of route=road relations are tagged with operator.

Feature operators would be arguably more useful, but their inclusion is a bit more complex. Each tag we'd want to include will need its own category file, but category files can use other files as templates. As a starting point, I think it would make sense to set up inheritance as follows:

• highway/primary
  • highway/primary_link
  • highway/motorway
    • highway/motorway_link
  • highway/trunk
    • highway/trunk_link
  • highway/secondary
    • highway/secondary_link
  • highway/tertiary
    • highway/tertiary_link
  • highway/unclassified
  • highway/residential

Some questions:

1. Should we include other highway types, like highway=service and highway=busway? What about footways, cycleways, and paths?
2. What should the inclusion criteria be? Because of how often roads are split, raw feature count is probably not going to be very useful, at least not at the order of magnitude we usually think about. taginfo says that there are 479,019 highway=* ways with operator. From a US perspective, we would likely want to include every state Department of Transportation, most turnpike authorities (where relevant), and counties in states with county road systems. We probably don't need to include every city and town, though major cities should be included.
3. Are there a large number of highway operators that do not operate motorways? Should highway/motorway not inherit from highway/primary?
4. Is this worthwhile considering the limitations of iD-style presets, with one preset per feature?

Rail

Railway tagging uses multiple different types of relations (route=railway, route=tracks, route=train) as well as tags on the ways themselves. Tagging standards, including the use of relations, differ by region, especially in Germany and North America. A previous request (#7857) to add North American railway operators brought up a dispute about how operator should be tagged.

That's not to say we shouldn't include railway=rail in the Index, but we should have local agreement on the tagging before we do.