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Around here, you may have power lines that come from different places, but along the way they begin to share poles to a common terminus. Should this 'overlap' be tagged as one way with power=line cables=6 (cables=3 is the normal number for a single line), or is it better to use two ways that share nodes? Does one line having a different voltage make a difference?

asked 28 Jul '10, 03:35

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NE2
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edited 08 Jan '11, 15:13

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(10 Mar '11, 17:00) Baloo Uriza

It really depends how much detail you can be bothered to map with power lines. Personally I would represent this set up as either three ways joining to form a 'Y' shape, or as two ways (a longer one and spur joining on)...

...and then I would stick at power=line tag on there. End of story.

Some super-diligent people might like to also tag ways with the number of cables, so you might have a way with cables=2 and way with cables=4 and beyond the point where they've joined together, another way with cables=6

Different voltages? Well then you would have to draw two ways on top of eachother sharing the same nodes (NOT duplicate nodes) to represent this.

Duplicate ways are a bit messy and difficult to work with in the editors. As such, it's worth thinking about avoiding them a little bit, but they are commonly used and widely accepted as the way to represent two different things, where tagging on the same way would not work.

In this case you have to use duplicate ways to represent the different tag values you want to map, but this seems quite hypothetical. The response which springs to mind first of all is... Do you know the voltage values, and can you really be bothered to map them??

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answered 29 Jul '10, 14:47

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Harry Wood
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Avoid duplicating ways, the tags you suggest seem to be your best option.

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answered 28 Jul '10, 15:24

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Baloo Uriza
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And what if the two lines have a different voltage? What goes in the voltage field?

(28 Jul '10, 16:17) NE2
4

If there are two separate lines with different voltages I'd use two ways.

(28 Jul '10, 19:53) petschge
-7

You get the best answers if you put your question here:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Power_lines

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answered 07 Jan '11, 16:09

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question asked: 28 Jul '10, 03:35

question was seen: 6,134 times

last updated: 10 Mar '11, 17:00

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum