[talk-au] Tagging fire stations

[Mark Rattigan]

Hi Phil

I suspect that 'cleaning-up' these tags would require local knowledge for each location, and is certainly not as clean-cut as making sure that either one or the other is used.

There are cases when only the building tag should be used, and some when only the amenity tag should be used. And others when both are appropriate.


The building tag is intended for the original purpose of the building - ie, built as/to be a fire station. A historical/defunct fire station is still tagged as building=fire_station, even when it's no longer in use as such. (The same philosophy applies to building=church, even when it's no longer a place of worship)

The amenity=fire_station indicates a location from which fire brigades (currently) operate.

For example, the DFES Education and Heritage Centre in Perth could be tagged as building=fire_station because that was its original purpose - it was originally No. 1 Fire Station. It couldn't be amenity=fire_station as it's not used as a fire station.

There are also plenty of minor RFS brigades which operate out of buildings that weren't originally built to be fire stations.


As for the amenity and whether it's an area or a point - it could possibly depend on whether the facility is solely for a fire brigade.
For example, my local emergency service building houses all of Police, Ambulance, Fire&Rescue, RFS and SES. It seems to have the following tags:

For the building (perhaps this is incorrect though!)
building=government
amenity=fire_station

Within this building there are separate nodes:
1: emergency=ambulance_station (for Ambulance)
2: amenity=fire_station (for RFS)
3: amenity=emergency_service and emergency=ses_station (for SES)
4: amenity=police
(I thought there used to be a node tagged amenity=fire_station for Fire&Rescue, but it's no-longer.)

Cheers
Mark




Message: 4
Date: Sun, 9 Oct 2022 20:10:15 +1100
From: "Phil Wyatt" <phil at wyatt-family.com>
To: "OSM-Au" <talk-au at openstreetmap.org>
Subject: [talk-au] Next tagging clean up project
Message-ID: <000401d8dbbe$f3cbf990$db63ecb0$@wyatt-family.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Hi Folks,



I am looking for my next tagging clean-up project and wondered about amenity
and building tags for fire stations



amenity=fire_station -
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dfire_station -
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1mAq



building=fire_station -
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:building%3Dfire_station -
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1mAr



This is partly in response to an issue logged for the ID editor requesting a
preset for fire stations buildings.



https://github.com/openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema/pull/603



There is already an ID preset for 'Fire Station' that uses the
amenity=fire_station key/value but it did get me looking at the differences
and how its been applied in Australia. There is a clear mix of buildings and
amenity tagging on both station areas and buildings, and some with both
tags!



https://taginfo.geofabrik.de/australia-oceania/australia/tags/amenity=fire_s
tation#combinations



Should it always be the case that the 'plot' on which the fire station
building resides is the 'amenity' and the 'building' should be separate
within the plot? To me, its not 100% clear in the wiki's.



Any thoughts?



Cheers - Phil

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