Proposal:Flowlines
| Flowlines | |
|---|---|
| Proposal status: | Proposed (under way) |
| Proposed by: | JesseFW |
| Tagging: | waterway=flowline |
| Applies to: | way |
| Definition: | Slow-moving flow through a water body. |
| Statistics: |
|
| Draft started: | 2024-08-09 |
| RFC start: | 2024-08-12 |
Proposal
Where a watercourse enters a lake and ceases to be recognizable as a stream or river, start a way tagged waterway=flowline.
Alternate proposal
Where a way tagged with waterway=* connects to the border of an area tagged with natural=water, create additional ways connecting it to the other waterways that connect to the water body, continuing the waterway=* tagging on those ways, but also tagging them with the new tag, flowline=yes. (Idea suggested by User:TrickyFoxy)
Rationale
This tag answers a very longstanding need. Having waterways fully connected to each other allows for a wide range of interesting and useful visualizations, some of which are depicted on waterwaymap.org . But using the existing waterway tags (stream & river) is misleading, since the flow of water thru a lake or pond is importantly different than the flow thru a narrow channel.
Tagging
This adds a single tag -- waterway=flowline, which typically wouldn't get any other tags added to it, although it could have most of the same tags as the water body it is within. It is distinguished from waterway=link which represents paths that boats can take, rather than where water flows.
It implies a direction, like waterway=river and waterway=stream, and unlike waterway=link. Since the purpose is to connect existing waterways, ways tagged with it should share a starting and ending node with other waterways.
One open question is whether to tag flowlines connecting named rivers with the name of the river. While this should be limited to cases where the same name applies to both ends of the flowline, there is still controversy over whether this should be done in all cases. This proposal takes no position on this.
Another open question is whether connecting ways in particularly large (or small) water bodies should remain tagged as waterway=river (or waterway=stream) rather than being re-tagged as waterway=flowline. This proposal leaves this up to local mapping communities.
Examples
- Pretty straightforward example running across a lake
- More complex set of flowlines thru a reservoir
- Example from quincylvania, the originator of the tag
Rendering
Features/Pages affected
- Tag:waterway=flowline would be updated to state that this has passed the proposal process. :-)
- Waterway, Water_management & waterway=* would be updated to mention the new tag.
External discussions
- Very long discussion (starting in Oct 2023) which prompted the earliest mention of this tag
- PR to iD to add rendering
- PR to iD-tagging-schema to add preset
- Comment about insufficient discussion
- RfC announcement on forum
- RfC announcement on mailing list
Comments
Please comment on the discussion page.