Vehicle types description

[Azbesciak]

Hi,
there are the following types of vehicle types for the transportation layer:

      enum: [ vehicle, motor_vehicle, car, truck, motorcycle, foot, bicycle, bus, hgv, hov, emergency ]
      "$comment": >-
        motor_vehicle includes car, truck and motorcycle

first of all, what is the difference between truck and hgv?
secondly, is it correct that motor_vehicle does not contain bus?

[brad-richardson]

truck is for lower-weight commercial goods delivery, I believe the intent is to remap the OSM goods key for this. However, I just checked and we currently don't output truck as a vehicle type anywhere. I'll flag this to the task force for review.

hgv is for higher weight goods delivery, e.g. semi trucks hauling trailers or "18 wheelers".

You are correct that motor_vehicle does not contain bus, just typical residential and light commercial vehicle types. Except where explicitly stated otherwise, we typically follow OSM's definitions for all of these values.

[Azbesciak]

But since we have a dedicated specification for vehicle mass, does it make sense to have that truck? Or rather, since truck is a more common, to have HGV? Cannot it just be a truck?

BTW what with trailers, or semi? These have quite often different limitations

[Azbesciak]

Also, since motor_vehicle does not contain bus and it is only said it contains car, truck and motorcycle - what with hgv. What with vehicle - what does it contain (is bicycle a vehicle)? And what with the emergency in it (I would assume it is a special and not included in vehicle) - that is rather obvious, but still questionable, and would be good to have it explicitly said.

[brad-richardson]

Here's the full taxonomy of travel modes, does that help? https://docs.overturemaps.org/schema/concepts/by-theme/transportation/travel-modes/#the-travel-modes-taxonomy

As you've noticed, it's hard to have clear cut definitions on these because they aren't mutually exclusive in the real world (unfortunately 🙂). We're open to proposals for improvements, although we tend to rely on OSM and the "wisdom of the crowd", trying not to stray too far from that unless we can demonstrate a clear improvement.

[Azbesciak]

hmm.

You are correct that motor_vehicle does not contain bus

[brad-richardson]

Ha, that's my bad, apologies! I've filed an issue to track that disconnect: #265