Mechanical Edits/TillWenke/moving hitchhiking stops to 'highway=hitchhiking' (mainly in Europe/Germany)

This mechanical edit was performed on May 11, 2025.

Page content created as advised on Automated_Edits_code_of_conduct#Document_and_discuss_your_plans.

Who

I, User:Tillwenke using my bot account

contact

message via OSM I will respond also to PMs to the personal account.

What

highway=hitchhiking as been established as an OSM Wiki standard for hitchhiking stops lately.

[390 nodes right after finishing this mechanical edit]

To have less/no competing de-facto standards on openstreetmap.org, I want to move all entries of hitchhiking stops that currently exist and follow another way of tagging to the above standard of tagging.

Here are tags that are currently used for hitchhiking stops for a significant number of entries, all of them should be transferred to the standard: [After performing the mechanical edit there were no nodes anymore which used those non-standard tags.]

hitchhiking=local

highway=hitchhiking_bench

amenity=hitchhiking_bench

hitchhiking=bench

hitchhiking=official

hitchhiking=yes

1-by-1 discussion

hitchhiking=local

Mostly used with amenity=bench

Do we want to transfer all bench features to the new node? [Yes, this was done for now to keep this information that might be transferred to a separately mapped bench.]
Do we want to preserve "hitchhiking=local" as a tag to the new node? Adding to the highway=hitchhiking standard that this signals the purpose of local transport/commute in comparison to long distance transport (mostly on highways). [No, there is no reason to indicate that this spot is intended for local transport, mainly due to a lack of historical usage of a similar tag that would intend the opposite (long-distance travel). Similar to highway=bus_stop the operator or network tag should be used to indicate the intended travel distances.]

highway=hitchhiking_bench

This comes from a quite narrow understanding of hitchhiking stops as hitchhiking benches which is mostly popular in Germany. Often comes with some bench specific tags. That is why the "bench=yes" tag is important on highway=hitchhiking.

Do we want to transfer all bench features to the new node? [Yes]
@https://mitfahrverband.org do any applications rely on this tag already? [No replies. Assuming, no.]

amenity=hitchhiking_bench

Similar to "highway=hitchhiking_bench".

Why

To have less/no competing de-facto standards and to make integrating with OSM simpler for sites like hitchwiki.org, hitchmap.org or hitchr.world.

Non of the above tag is currently used by any project, see:

How

Changeset would be described and tagged with tags that mark it as automatic.

automatic=yes
bot=yes
created_by=osmapi/1.0.2

Edits generated by an osmapi based program using https://github.com/matkoniecz/osm_bot_abstraction_layer .

Discussion

Now only in #Discussion.

Previously in the Proposal thread.

Repetition

Redoing this edit in the future would be treated as a new mechanical edit with a new approval process.

Code

https://github.com/Hitchwiki/osm_hitchhiking_bot

Questions as a first time mechanical editor

Can you recommend https://github.com/matkoniecz/osm_bot_abstraction_layer for python-based mechanical edits? [Worked pretty seamlessly using the Code above.]

Opt-out

Please comment in the discussion thread (see #Discussion).