search

streetcomplete / StreetComplete

Easy to use OpenStreetMap editor for Android
https://streetcomplete.app
GNU General Public License v3.0
3.7k stars 343 forks source link

What kind of fuel is sold here? #2708

Open 1ec5 opened 3 years ago

1ec5 commented 3 years ago

General

Affected tag(s) to be modified/added: fuel:* Question asked: What kind of fuel is sold here?

Checklist

Checklist for quest suggestions (see guidelines):

Ideas for implementation

Element selection:

amenity=fuel would be the most important. shop=fuel might be able to reuse the same quest, but there may be a wider range of likely answers. Other tags like aeroway=fuel are less likely because they could require specialized access.

Metadata needed:

Colloquial names and available octane levels may vary somewhat by country or subnational region, but StreetComplete can display a superset of available options to simplify the implementation.

For example, in the United States, diesel and biodiesel are probably the only diesel types one would ever encounter at a retail gas station. Winter blend diesel is served from the same pump as nonwinterized diesel, so there’s no need to tag it explicitly. This table summarizes the colloquial names for unleaded fuel types, which vary by state and sometimes by county. However, there is a preference for more specific octane numbers (grades), which have uniform definitions across the country. Octane numbers are typically posted at the pump but not on monument signs. The legally available grades again vary by state and sometimes county, and many gas stations only offer some of the legally available grades. But that’s why the quest wouldn’t be considered spamming. It’s no problem to present a few extra octane numbers that the user won’t encounter locally.

Proposed GUI:

Multiple selection from among the various values at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:fuel, particularly under the “Diesel”, “Octane levels”, and “Formulas” sections.

matkoniecz commented 3 years ago

Have you seen #121 #2151 ? (have not checked whether reasons for closing them apply here, but I also do not see them mentioned here).

1ec5 commented 3 years ago

Oh sorry, I hadn’t seen them. I must’ve searched for the wrong term or something and missed them. I hadn’t been following this repository closely until recently so I don’t have a good grasp on what has been proposed so far.

I think most of the points in https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/121#issuecomment-687750980 are actually tractable as long as the quest isn’t too ambitious:

quests should be solveable by anyone, but not everyone may know what actual fuel is behind a certain brand name

At least in the U.S., there are colloquial names and brands for different kinds of fuel and yes, they do vary a lot. However, a standardized designation is reliably posted at the pump (by law). The quest can direct users to walk up to the pump to get the most precise value. For example, a mapper would see things like “Regular”, “Plus”, and “V-Power” on the monument sign but would be able to get the octane numbers by looking at these yellow stickers:

octane

If this isn’t feasible in other countries, perhaps the quest could be limited to countries where it is.

there are lots and lots of different fuel types, see taginfo and wiki, and to make sense of it (and recognize which brands/fuels are the same/synonyms) is a huge task

The proposal above focuses on amenity=fuel, which I think helps to mitigate the problem that a much wider variety of fuels can be sold at shop=fuel and other establishments. The point of this quest is to enrich data about mainstream gas stations, not niche facilities for trucks, high-performance cars, or airplanes. But maybe I’m underestimating the degree to which fuel types are branded around the world – did another country really manage to apply more commercial branding to something than the U.S. does? 🙈

since there are so many variants/synonyms, it would be a huge effort to find country-specific defaults so that for any one country, only the relevant/actually used ones are shown

In my opinion, a user can cope with seeing a few options that are never available locally, as long as it isn’t an intimidating list overall. Again with my American bias, here’s how I’d break down the options if I didn’t know anything about OSM tagging:

It’s still the case that you could drive across an entire state and never see a station that offers alternative fuel, and every state has its own minimum and maximum octane numbers. But as long as the options are organized this way, I don’t think it would pose a major usability problem. I wonder if it would be possible to extend this single hierarchy to accommodate other countries, or if each country would need its own hierarchy. If the latter, I’d selfishly amend my proposal to cover just the U.S. 😁

in principle, this tagging scheme has the same problem as the recycling: tagging scheme: Is a certain fuel not available or has it just not been tagged (yet)? This is problematic because as soon as there is any fuel: tag, we have to assume that it only sells the given fuel(s). So, even asking "Does this fuel station sell LPG?", which would be an important thing to ask (if it wasn't spam) is not possible because then we'd have to tag the fuel station in a way that implicitly suggests that it only sells LPG.

Denoting exhaustiveness is a problem with any tagging scheme that accepts multiple values, whether using subkeys or semicolons. (The language:* scheme solves this problem with an awkward language:others=no tag.)

In my opinion, it’s OK if StreetComplete considers a gas station to have been fully tagged once there’s any fuel:*=* tag: the available fuels are pretty much always posted together in the same place. Sometimes diesel and alternative fuels are signposted separately, but they’re pretty prominent in those cases, at least in my experience in the U.S. So it doesn’t seem likely to me that a mapper would only partially answer this question. If the concern is about missing new LPG offerings that come along later, wouldn’t that be best handled by a time-based check, similar to the “Is this still here?” quest?

matkoniecz commented 3 years ago

Oh sorry, I hadn’t seen them. I must’ve searched for the wrong term or something and missed them. I hadn’t been following this repository closely until recently so I don’t have a good grasp on what has been proposed so far.

yes, while searching fuel: found them the first three results were not encouraging to look though them. Unless someone knows that something on this topic was posted already.

1ec5 commented 3 years ago

Similar to https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/2704#issuecomment-812555761, if we’re OK with asking users multiple things about a gas station that could be surveyed at the same time, it would make sense to break up this quest into multiple quests that don’t attempt to be exhaustive:

Gas and diesel

Above, I had included alternative fuels for completeness, but they’re still rare enough in the U.S. that I don’t think they make sense as separate quests yet.

If this makes sense to everyone, I can close this issue and open new ones with appropriate template responses for the individual quests.

westnordost commented 3 years ago

that don’t attempt to be exhaustive

As far as I understand the fuel:*=* scheme, it is commonly understood to be exhaustive because the values are usually only set when it is yes, not when it is no. Like the recycling:*=* scheme but unlike the payment:*=* scheme, where no is a common value.

westnordost commented 3 years ago

Went to a fuel station just to see how it ususally looks like in DE:

20210331_220651

How'd that need to be tagged? I guess "Super FuelSave E10" etc. are brand names, so what are OSM values?

Disclaimer: I don't own a car and maybe I never even fuelled a car once in my life.

mnalis commented 3 years ago

this is how it looks in Croatia: benzinska

I'm in the somewhat similar situation regarding cars, but here is my take:

mnalis commented 3 years ago

So, to answer your question @westnordost, your fuels are likely (left to right):

In my picture here (left to right):

in 1ec5s picture:

As suggested in @1ec5 here, it is probably enough to mark just highest available octane number (eg. fuel:octane_91=yes in this case) - or mark all range of fuel:octane_*=no in case (quite unlikely, should ask user for confirmation) that no petrol fuel is available at all.

westnordost commented 3 years ago

Hm... I find this rather confusing. How to communicate to the user which one he ought to choose. Given that most fuel stations belong to brands, and they will have the same brand names for the same fuel, maybe it would be better to create a dictionary first that assigns OSM tag values to fuel brand names for each fuel station brand.

Or.... will one brand always have the exact same set of fuels available? If that would be the case, it would make more sense to just record the brand of the fuel station and actually not any fuel:* tags.

kmpoppe commented 3 years ago

Given the German (and I might think European) laws require stations to sell you fuel:e10, it is likely, that every Shell station in Germany will sell you Diesel, Super 95 octane, Super E10, Super 100 octane. Yet, some stations MIGHT sell HGV Diesel (on motorways and primary roads), but not if they are located in mostly residential areas where it's physically impossible to go with a Truck > 7.5to.

I wonder if a quest like this meets the "🐿️ Easily answerable by everyone from the outside" criteria. For a survey you HAVE to walk along all the pumps (through the cars stationary there) to see if you find any fuel-type you didn't see before. Also, myself - being on the road for almost 20 years now - would not be able to answer the quest in the detail that I'd want from the picture @mnails showed.

^Kai

mnalis commented 3 years ago

@westnordost at least around here, brands would not equate fuel offer. While most (all?) fuel stations will offer fuel:octane_95=yes and fuel:diesel=yes (regardless of the brand), the ones offering fuel:taxfree_diesel=yes would usually be closer to the fields or the sea instead in the middle of the cities (which get complicated to distinguish when you have cities on the seaside), and other offerings (octane_98, octane_100, lpg, propane, etc.) are available on reduced number on stations, even for the same brand (with octane_98 being much more common than others).

But I would guess most of the people visiting fuel stations are admittedly motor vehicle drivers (those of use coming with bicycles to use free air pumps are minority), who seem to easily distinguish the offering (eg. are at least able to easily choose the cheapest fuel which will work with their vehicle and know which are incompatible fuels).

@kmpoppe I don't think E10 is EU standard, Croatia seems to use E5 mostly. I'm not sure I understand you being confused by our fuel stations? IMHO Basically any motor vehicle driver from anywhere should always be able to answer those (even in foreign place, much less his home country!):

Don't you agree? Or are those confusing to you (Some alternative fuels like H2 might admittedly be confusing to average Croatian car owner, but only because we don't have those, so not mapping them is just fine). As for the more details (E5 or E10, B7, fuel quality etc.) - I don't think it is really that important to most car drivers, who IMHO usually just want not to be stranded in the middle of nowhere (price is probably something the majority of them is more concerned with - at least in this part of the world).

Also, I don't know if you have to walk the pumps, in Croatia it is very often announced with price visible from the road (dunno about other regions) like this: ina

1ec5 commented 3 years ago

I’m convinced that the U.S. hits the sweet spot of being able to easily survey a sign or pump and enter corresponding OSM tags. There’s effectively only one kind of diesel (which we call “diesel #2”), and each kind of fuel is straightforwardly indicated, regardless of brands. (There is a federal regulation mandating the exact color, size, padding, font face, font size, and text alignment of that label.) Besides, most types of fuel aren’t even properly branded: the most common monikers are “Regular”, “Plus”, and “Premium”, but regular could correspond to a different octane number between two gas stations across the street from each other.

Previously, unleaded fuel here was completely untaggable in OSM because of an insistence on RON octane numbers, but we fixed the documentation so mappers can freely enter AKI octane numbers.

From the discussion above, it’s far less certain that other countries are as fortunate. Perhaps as a first pass, what about a U.S.-specific challenge that we could gradually open up to other countries as we figure out how to make them taggable?

will one brand always have the exact same set of fuels available?

In the U.S., this is far from being the case. Most brands are franchises; franchisees generally have a lot of leeway over which fuels to offer, as long as it’s all legal. Moreover, gas stations change hands and change brands very frequently, some every couple years around here, so the octane numbers are probably more stable anyways. It’s a lot easier to replace a logo panel on a monument sign to rebrand than to replace pump and storage infrastructure and go through regulatory and inspection processes to offer different octane fuel.

I wonder if a quest like this meets the "🐿️ Easily answerable by everyone from the outside" criteria. For a survey you HAVE to walk along all the pumps (through the cars stationary there) to see if you find any fuel-type you didn't see before.

In the U.S., the gas pumps are outside and freely accessible, at least in the 48 states where self-serve gasoline is legal. Each pump at a given station has the same options, so you only have to walk up to one of the pumps. If a quest must be answerable from the inside of a car in motion along the road – in other words, requiring only a glance at the monument sign – then the documentation should make that clear. But that would probably disqualify quite a few existing quests. After all, you usually have to walk farther from the sidewalk to get the opening hours of the convenience store than to get the octane numbers from a gas pump.

In New Jersey and Oregon, where full-service gas stations predominate, it would be a bit more awkward to walk up to a gas pump, but on the other hand, you could just ask the attendant to read out the stickers for you. Edit: New Jerseyans on OSMUS Slack say it’s easy to see the octane number stickers and no big deal to walk around a full-service station.

@westnordost and @mnalis, did you get any weird stares for walking up to a gas pump without a car? I don’t think it would normally be a problem here, but that’s always good to keep in mind when enabling quests in certain geographies.

I don't know if you have to walk the pumps, in Croatia it is very often announced with price visible from the road (dunno about other regions) like this

If that photo is representative of the situation in Croatia, then the quest would be just as simple and practical in Croatia as in the U.S. 🎉 (In the U.S., the octane number is sometimes listed on the monument sign too, just not as reliably.)

smichel17 commented 3 years ago

Each pump has the same options, so you only have to walk up to one of the pumps.

Just to nitpick, I've seen some stations where there is a separate pump for diesel. But even in those cases, it is pretty obvious and easy to survey.

letypequividelespoubelles commented 3 years ago

If that photo is representative of the situation in Croatia, then the quest would be just as simple and practical in Croatia as in the U.S.

Same for France too so, and I guess at least for many other europpean countries.

The only issue I see if we want to make this quest worldwide, is that the "alternative fuel" list is depending of the country. For exemple, in Ouzbekistan, the everyday fuel are methan and propane, and the (rare) alternative fuel are diesel and octane.

vvizzo commented 3 years ago

In Poland we have usually:

Other super/euro etc. are just brand variations on these choices above with some additions. Eg. Diesel is just plain fuel, Shell V-Power Diesel is the same with special ingredients which supposedly make it eg. easier to start engine in cold. Any driver which will see this is Shell station and with Diesel tag would know V-Power variants will be there. No need to spell it in SC.

1ec5 commented 3 years ago

So far, it seems like the quest could cover a decent number of countries without requiring much per-country customization by listing several of the “alternative fuels” from https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/2708#issuecomment-811394374 as top-level options, so as not to inconvenience users in countries that prioritize different fuels, as in https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/2708#issuecomment-813033950.

Each of the photos above do indicate the octane numbers for unleaded fuel somewhere on the pump. However, in some countries, the appearance and location of the octane number may be buried in other indications and branding. So the graphics and instructions for this quest would be critical and would have to differ by country. The standardized stickers in the U.S. make the design pretty straightforward: the user types into a yellow square, similar to the housenumber quest’s design. For the Croatian and German examples above, there may need to be an explicit instruction to look for a number after a moniker like “Super” or “Eurosuper”.

mnalis commented 3 years ago

@1ec5 yes, that is typical fuel station in Croatia, so I don't anticipate problems mapping fuel stations here.

As for using the fuel station without motor vehicle, it is quite common here - most of them have air compressors, which are widely used by cyclists too (some also have bicycle repair stations), and majority also have a shop integrated, where you can buy snacks and beverages among other things related to vehicles or fuel (like camping stove cartridges etc). It's actually quite popular way to get alcoholic beverages when shops are closed, as many fuel stations are 24/7. Outside of cities, they'd also have toilets and cafes/diners.

Didn't know about different octane ratings in USA, interesting fact. Luckily people mostly don't try to drive US car in Europe, as that difference might hit their engine quite hard.

andrewharvey commented 3 years ago

To chime in for Australia it would be fine to ask

  1. Does this petrol station have diesel? fuel:diesel=yes/no
  2. Which unleaded fuels does this petrol station have? (which option to select any combination of these, or none. For none just tag all the following fuel:*=no)
    • E10 fuel:e10=yes/no
    • 91 fuel:octane_91=yes/no
    • 95 fuel:octane_95=yes/no
    • 98 fuel:octane_98=yes/no
      1. Does this petrol station have LPG? fuel:lpg=yes/no

Not sure if it's better to ask these as 3 separate quests or as a single quest.

There are probably other specialised fuels offered, but these are the standard ones.

ygra commented 3 years ago

Each pump has the same options, so you only have to walk up to one of the pumps.

Just to nitpick, I've seen some stations where there is a separate pump for diesel. But even in those cases, it is pretty obvious and easy to survey.

There are also a few stations where not every pump has the full set of fuels, and LPG is most often in a separate place.

On the other hand, here (Germany) at least, you can just look at the large board with all the prices, which should be exhaustive, I guess.

Lee-Carre commented 2 years ago

This quest should probably be kept disabled for Jersey (and I would assume Guernsey, too).

Many of the assumptions, above, simply don't hold true. Even when using Vespucci, sometimes I have no idea how to tag a fuel station correctly.

There's little consistency, and something of a free-for-all in terms of what's offered. Often, only vague branding is visible, without clear indicators of exactly what a fuel is (e.g. just that it's unleaded, but not the octane rating). So much so that for some stations, I've only been able to tag fuel:diesel=yes, because anything else would be a guess. But, then, this place didn't even declare who their fuel supplier was (for brand=*). Experience told me that it would be futile to ask staff, since they wouldn't have a clue (and it was self_service=yes, anyway). I'd probably have better results talking to the distributor. Most such staff are on minimum-wage, and (understandably) don't really give a damn (especially to answer technical questions from a surveyor), even if they had the time to do so.

Even when it's not guessing, there's a degree of assumption involved. E.g. for unleaded you may only see Regular & Super (though not always), yet the actual octane rating isn't consistent for those labels. I've even seen a fuel:octane_99 (yup, not 98, not 100).

Often, pumps serve different sets of fuels, even at the same station. Branding is no indication of which fuels will be available.

Being a small place, there usually isn't exhaustive signage (as was described for Germany). There appears to be no (enforced) regulation over consistent signage of fuel types.

Because most everything has to be imported, market economics is a very strong factor over what's available. Some fuels won't even be imported unless there's sufficient (& consistent) demand for them. This includes the likes of RON 98, and certain special (higher energy-density) ones used by motor-racing (which is a popular sport, here), much to the annoyance of those who need such fuels. Sometimes, even offloading the tanker is a mission. At least once, it was unable to make it to the specialised dock / berth; a combination of the tanker being too big, and the water-depth being too shallow, I gather.

It's a mess. On top of that, not all fuel stations are mapped (and those that are, aren't mapped properly), yet, either. Don't even get me started about amenity=charging_stations. Doing my best to work on remedying all of this. Le sigh…

timothywashere commented 2 years ago

I know this is quite an old thread but recently the UK standard fuel switched to E10 with 10% Ethanol. This causes problems for certain engines, so it would certainly be useful to be able to find stations that sell premium E5 fuel. No-one asked but I'll tell you the situation in the UK anyway for completeness In the UK generally every station sells Diesel and Unleaded. A few sell Autogas. Confusingly Standard petrol is referred to as Premium. Expensive mixes have various names according to the franchise but can easily be identified by octane range from 97 to 99 RON. Not all stations of the same brand always sell the complete range.

arrival-spring commented 2 years ago

I feel like in the UK what you want is something like

(Which exist and are useful and fine)

Then for petrol, something like:

But these aren't really approved and the wiki just lists the really specific tags.

timothywashere commented 2 years ago

Well the Premium types could be mapped to specific octane via metadata.

1ec5 commented 2 years ago

I think ideally both the specific octane numbers and the marketing names would be considered valid. That way, mappers could map what they see and editors don’t have to get fancy, regardless of whether the current region only posts octane numbers or only posts marketing names. Meanwhile, in places where both are posted but the marketing names are meaningless and highly inconsistent – such as the U.S. and Canada – the marketing names could be considered a temporary form of mapping to be refined (no pun intended) with specific octane numbers by other mappers. But as the documentation and database currently stand, the octane numbers predominate.

matkoniecz commented 1 year ago

Given complexity, it seems to me that

As far as I understand the fuel:*=* scheme, it is commonly understood to be exhaustive because the values are usually only set when it is yes, not when it is no. Like the recycling:*=* scheme but unlike the payment:*=* scheme, where no is a common value.

is a blocker. Otherwise you could ask simple questions like "Is petrol/diesel/LNG sold here?" but as I understand current tagging scheme does not allow to tag just this and requires tagging entire complexity in one go.

Only

At least in the U.S., there are colloquial names and brands for different kinds of fuel and yes, they do vary a lot. However, a standardized designation is reliably posted at the pump (by law). The quest can direct users to walk up to the pump to get the most precise value. For example, a mapper would see things like “Regular”, “Plus”, and “V-Power” on the monument sign but would be able to get the octane numbers by looking at these yellow stickers:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gas_Station_Pump_Five_Octane_Ratings.jpg

gives me some hope that it could be implementable there, but I am not really familiar with either USA or cars.

about situation in Poland:

Other super/euro etc. are just brand variations on these choices above with some additions. Eg. Diesel is just plain fuel, Shell V-Power Diesel is the same with special ingredients which supposedly make it eg. easier to start engine in cold. Any driver which will see this is Shell station and with Diesel tag would know V-Power variants will be there. No need to spell it in SC.

The problem is that communicating that "Shell V-Power Diesel" is just diesel and so on goes against what various producers do and present their overpriced fuel variant as entirely new separate fuel type.

Not sure how to effectively communicate this in SC, especially as in many cases this will not be obvious.

mnalis commented 1 year ago

is a blocker. Otherwise you could ask simple questions like "Is petrol/diesel/LNG sold here?" but as I understand current tagging scheme does not allow to tag just this and requires tagging entire complexity in one go.

Are you reading that at wiki somewhere, or is it just intuition / experience? I don't see it mentioned either at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:fuel or at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity=fuel#Fuel_types ?

1ec5 commented 1 year ago

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gas_Station_Pump_Five_Octane_Ratings.jpg

gives me some hope that it could be implementable there, but I am not really familiar with either USA or cars.

Yes, and the stickers shown in that photo are mandated by federal law down to a very fine degree, so we can count on them to be posted. Canada has similar regulations.

For completeness: in the U.S., diesel fuel is classified differently than unleaded fuel. The vast majority of stations that sell diesel fuel only sell diesel #2 (summer), but some also sell diesel #1 (winter), various blends of biodiesel (fuel:biodiesel), and agricultural grade diesel (fuel:taxfree_diesel). The same yellow stickers are posted on diesel pumps, so it’s still just as surveyable.

WEB_SITE_014 Diesel #2, three winter blends of #1 and #2, and B2 (2% biodiesel, 98% diesel).

This wiki table seems to go out of its way to avoid specifying a key for winter blend or winterized diesel, but the existing diesel subkeys are structured so that, if it’s important to be more specific than just “diesel”, a sub-subkey such as fuel:diesel:grade1[^numbers] or fuel:diesel:grade2 could be coined in the future, perhaps as part of a separate quest.

[^numbers]: Not to be confused with the Eurocentric fuel:diesel:class2 documented on the wiki, which is kind of analogous to grade #1 but based on entirely different criteria.

matkoniecz commented 1 year ago

@mnalis Not sure... I asked on https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Key:fuel#Is_tagging_of_fuel%3A_assumed_to_be_exhaustive%3F some time ago and now at https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2023-April/067213.html

micronull commented 1 year ago

When I'm at a gas station, I often get the urge to mark this tag.

StreetComplete would help me do this quickly.

Also, this tag is very helpful when mapping rare fuel, such as methane and propane.