Don't penalize button-operated traffic lights

[yuryleb]

IMHO it's possible to don't assign penalty to button-operated traffic lights. They are really usually at pedestrian crossings and used infrequently on on-demand basis.

[daniel-j-h]

Yes it's possible to do so, have a look here

osrm-backend/profiles/car.lua

Lines 280 to 282 in 5739c27

	if "traffic_signals" == tag then
	result.traffic_lights = true
	end

Not sure if it's a valid assumption to make, though.

[duizendnegen]

From my personal experience of going around in Hamburg and Amsterdam, button-operated traffic lights are as much a pain for the cars - they're used so much they should be seen as normal traffic lights I think.

I'd be happy to push some code to the default lua profile if we reach consensus here.

[yuryleb]

Seems you're so "lucky" driver as me 😉

Of course, just excluding such traffic lights is the simpliest solution but not the best. It's really 2-3 strings code change in lua. But this also requires some new cucumber test and/or adopting/extending a lot of existing ones - and so I didn't push anything for this issue yet.

But actually this issue is the just preparation for another, the much important for me - increasing common traffic lights penalty to more realistic value than current 2 seconds. I already prepared some comparison of the same route with different traffic lights penalties but got quite strange results with previous OSRM v5.5.4 - the changing only one penalty type seems to break overall balance of all others. Maybe OSRM v5.6.0 will act better.

[emiltin]

the problem with just raising the traffic light penalty is that intersections are often modelled with multiple nodes having traffic lights. but multiple traffic ligths changing together shouldn't incur a larger penalty. see #31 and #1250.

[yuryleb]

BTW it will be enough just to update LUA with new button_operated tag usage to get them extracted from OSM data into OSRM datafiles or something else like taginfo.json should be also extended?

[daniel-j-h]

Hm right now we only support highway=traffic_signals. I quickly sampled some intersections in Berlin

• http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/961984568
• http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/392182854

and it seems like they're using the crossing=traffic_signals tag in combination with button_operated.

The first node has

crossing    traffic_signals
highway     crossing

the second one

button_operated    no
crossing           island;traffic_signals
highway            crossing

The Wiki makes an explicit distinction between traffic signal tags for pedestrians and cars:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dtraffic_signals#Traffic_signals_for_cars

It also states

Add the following tags in addition to highway=traffic_signals for pedestrian crossings if the entire crossing is represented by a single node, or to each highway=crossing nodes if the pedestrian crossings are tagged on their own (strongly recommended).

A single traffic signal can have many crossings - I'm not sure if we should just add a penalty to all crossings in addition to a penalty for the traffic signal. It seems like @emiltin's comment above is spot on.

[yuryleb]

I'm going to don't add penalties to highway=traffic_signals + button_operated=yes instead 😉

[daniel-j-h]

Closing here - we can't do it in the default planet-wide profiles.