Talk:Waterways

Purpose

The talk page is for discussing how to improve this article. It can also be used to discuss new tagging suggestions. PeterIto 11:09, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

natural=lake?

I am not clear where the natural=lake tag came from that Harry mentions today. It might have come from one of the other merged articles or be a figment of my imagination which I introduced when I did the recent work on the article! Does it even render? On reflection we could use it for a natural area of water, and retain natural=water as the more generic tagging for a unspecified area of water which might be a reservoir or a lake or a dock. It is however possibly too late to make a change like this. PeterIto 21:45, 25 March 2012 (BST)

OneWay key

I suggest to add the key oneway=* (Yes/No/-1) as for Highways. Example: in Chalon-sur-Saone, there is a oneway direction to enter the marina. --Cordialement, gerdami 16:01, 29 July 2012 (BST)

My mistake: I made a confusion between flow of river and direction of navigation.--Cordialement, gerdami 21:12, 30 July 2012 (BST)

Dry lakebeds?

How to tag dry or seasonally dry lake(bed)s? Thanks

-- Hamish (talk) 06:32, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Trees and Bushes Along a waterway

It often occurs that a stream is accompanied by trees and bushes that only grow close to the water. There is currently no sensible way to tag this. I suggest to have an additional tag that can be added to any waterway, maybe call it green_banks=*. Values could be "left", "right", or "both", same as "yes". Sub-tags could be green_banks:width=* and green_banks:height=*, in order to provide the average amount of vegetation. Of course, a waterway would have to be split at the start and end of such a vegetation segment. And of course, this would not be applicable while the waterway crosses a forest. --Mink (talk) 17:17, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

natural=tree_row would be adequate for trees? There is also Proposed features/Hedgerow which I haven´t looked at yet. RicoZ (talk) 17:43, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Seems some kind of natural=scrub would be a better description than hedge in most cases. The scrub tag isn´t defined for linear ways as far as I can see, so either it should be extended to cover linear ways or a scrub_row analog to tree_row should get created. Mapping it as scrub area would be more correct but sometimes perhaps an overkill and I can see many other uses for strips of scrub. RicoZ (talk) 18:39, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

landuse=reservoir

I'm not sure if this even renders in the map. Wouldn't it be better to suggest tagging a reservoir with natural=water & water=reservoir? This is how I have mapped them. --ItalianMustache (talk) 16:36, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Agree, natural=water+water=reservoir is better. Landuse works as well.RicoZ (talk) 14:32, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Streams and rivers crossing forests, grasslands and bare_rock areas

There is some discussion what to do if a waterway crosses a bare_rock or other natural areas here: Talk:Tag:natural=bare rock . RicoZ (talk) 10:59, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Riverbanks

On this page, it is recommended to tag banks as follow:

• Rivers : waterway=riverbank
• For canals/drains : natural=water + water=canal

Why can't we agree on one of them (or a third possibility) to have banks in common for all waterways? I see no point to distinguish rivers, streams, canals as currently described Fanfouer (talk) 11:03, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

natural=water + water=river is sometimes used instead waterway=riverbank Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 11:14, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Changeable flow direction

There are some waterways where due to natural or technical reasons the flow direction changes from time to time. One example might be waterway=tidal_channel. The other example are sluiced canals connecting lakes and rivers. During freshets sluices are opened for the water to fill the lakes and thus water flows towards a lake. Then the sluices are closed and there is no flow. Sometimes to avoid overflow and flooding the sluices are opened to reduce water level inside a lake and this way water flows towards a river.

I believe there should be a way to omit the flow direction or make it bidirectional. -- VileGecko (talk) 19:06, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Hi! That's a good point and it makes me discover there are two solutions to do so currently reviewed:

Back in 2017, flow_direction=both was reviewed with the sinkholes proposal by @Penegal:

Then in 2018, hydropower water supplies proposal used the more established direction=both

What do you think about these? Fanfouer (talk) 21:10, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the swift reply! I'd be happy with flow_direction=both if only it was well-established and I do like the key and tag combination. I'll probably use this one here despite of scarcity in its usage. The other variant direction=both seems a bit ambiguous to me and there might arise some conflicts if there is some feature similar to roadsigns or calming measures (I know of the seamark=* scheme and its detachedness from the overall tagging) placed on a waterway. -- VileGecko (talk) 06:33, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

Re: tidal channels: the feature waterway=tidal_channel usually has reversible water flow by definition. This was mentioned in the proposal. The way direction is supposed to be drawn towards the sea. But I agree that it would be useful to have a tag for this situation in the case of artificial canals and ditches. I suppose flow_direction=both is less ambiguous, compared to direction=both which might be considered to mean that two-way travel by boat is allowed, in the case of navigable canals. --Jeisenbe (talk) 05:07, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Streams passing through lakes

Mention how to map a stream that enters one end of a lake and leaves via the other end. Jidanni (talk) 04:53, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

It seems to me that a good practice would be not to include any name tags to a waterway segment running through a named lake or reservoir (name of the lake/reservoir supercedes name of the stream or river) but keep any wikidata or wikipedia tags in place and still include this segment to the waterway relation. --VileGecko (talk) 13:24, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

+1 Fanfouer (talk) 12:44, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Line vs. polygon

I've added a clarification; could someone review it, please? Thanks! Fgnievinski (talk) 04:49, 16 August 2024 (UTC)