alternate rail approach

[ajashton]

Current rail icons are rail, rail-underground, rail-above.

I've found that the distinction between above/below ground is generally less important/common than the distinction between national/regional rail systems and urban rapid transit (ie metro/subway) systems. The latter may have stations both above and below ground but would generally use the same icon for all of them.

An additional useful distinction would be for light rail/tram systems, as they are usually street-level, have a lower passenger capacity, and have more frequent stops.

I propose deprecating rail-underground and rail-above and replacing them with rail-metro (or rail-subway?) and rail-light. This would likely require altering the current rail design to better distinguish things.

[samanpwbb]

So you're proposing a three-level hierarchy for metro systems?

1. rail for the national/regional networks
2. rail-metrofor local networks
3. rail-light for trams/low capacity networks

Makes sense to me. Does this naming convention make sense? Would a rail-primary, rail-secondary, and rail-tertiary convention be better?

[ajashton]

Yes, that's a more clear way to put it :)

[jacksonj04]

I'm not convinced; rail-primary, rail-secondary and rail-tertiary to me sounds like it determines the size of the station (eg primary is a major interchange station such as city centre, secondary a smaller station with fewer facilities but still interchange, tertiary a branch station. rail, rail-metro and rail-light makes more sense to me since it describes the type of service, not the size.

[ajashton]

@jacksonj04 you're right, I read @samanpwbb's comment too quickly and didn't even see the last part about primary/secondary/tertiary. I don't think that's an appropriate abstraction here, and as you say it's easily confused with importance of stations within the same network.

[brycenesbitt]

There's also the rail entrances, which may be a distance frmo the stations. And remember an interchange station with should show at the level of the most important network it serves.

[nickidlugash]

@ajashton @MateoV I'm working on redesigning these and integrating the MapBox Streets icons. Can you confirm the names and definitions of the proposed new categorization? According to Wikipedia, here,here, and here, there is lots of overlap between transit definitions, so I just want to make sure I know how we want to make the distinctions.

1. rail: national/regional networks
2. rail-metro or rail-subway or rapid-transit: rapid transit
3. rail-light: light rails. Does this encompass trams/streetcars?

How important is it for the three icons to be immediately identifiable as what they are (versus just immediately distinguishable from one another)? It won't be hard to make the three icons look different, but I really can't think of any visual features that are unique to any one of the rail types, so the differences might just be arbitrary. Is that acceptable?

Also, we are adding a subway entrance icon (for the name, I'll append '-entrance' to whatever we choose to call the 2nd icon). Do the other two types of rail need entrance icons, too?

[ajashton]

I like rail-metro for 2. Wikipedia claims this is the most common term for it.

Trams/streetcars are separate from light rail if we're taking OSM tagging schemes into account.

I think arbitrary differences are ok given the overlap in concepts. In the cartography we'll also try to help differentiate the types better by what scale they show up at and how big the icons are.

[nickidlugash]

@ajashton @samanpwbb Here's my first pass at the new rail icons. From left to right: rail-heavy rail-light rail-metro. To save time, I'd love to get some feedback now before making a pull request for Maki.

@samanpwbb I named the first rail icon rail-heavy for now because we already have an icon named rail...I wasn't sure what our process should be for transitioning. If I rename the current rail something else and name the new icon rail, would that mess up people who are using the current icon?

[samanpwbb]

Cool, these are really close. I like how well the distinction between the three types comes through down to the smallest size. I would try to clarify the track bars on the 18px and 12px versions if you can. Might want to play with the angle a little until you find something crisper. The 12px rail-metro metro feels a little fuzzy around the edges so that might need to little more work too.

@samanpwbb I named the first rail icon rail-heavy for now because we already have an icon named rail...I wasn't sure what our process should be for transitioning. If I rename the current rail something else and name the new icon rail, would that mess up people who are using the current icon?

We should use new names for the new icons. This will allow us to keep the old rail, rail-underground, and rail-above icons around, but deprecate them. Use the deprecated tag: https://github.com/mapbox/maki/blob/gh-pages/_includes/maki.json#L1081-L1087 - which hides the icons from the MapBox editor and from the Maki site.

[nickidlugash]

@samanpwbb thanks for the feedback, will work on refining the icons.

Is rail-heavy ok to keep as the name for national/regional rails, or is there a better option?

[ajashton]

We can keep rail named the same and just update the icon. The meaning of this one hasn't really changed.

[samanpwbb]

we should still deprecate the above and underground icons though eh?

[ajashton]

ya