[Talk-GB] Metropolitan counties and other boundaries

[Gregory]

It might be good to look at how My Society's MapIt api handles the levels.
I had to use that very quickly and then found myself writing lots of edge
queries to get the right level in the heirachy.
On 20 Feb 2014 19:53, "Colin Smale" <colin.smale at xs4all.nl> wrote:

>  Hi Robert,
>
> On 2014-02-20 20:17, Robert Whittaker (OSM lists) wrote:
>
> On 20 February 2014 11:34, Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> one thing I noticed is that there are two schools of thought regarding
> Metropolitan Districts. These are a subdivision of Metropolitan Counties,
> of which there are six: Greater Manchester, Merseyside, South Yorkshire,
> Tyne and Wear, West Midlands and West Yorkshire.
>
> I would like to normalise this tagging, and looking at the current usage
> above and the wiki[1], propose that the Metropolitan Counties become
> boundary=ceremonial, and the Metropolitan Districts become
> boundary=administrative, admin_level=8.
>
> If the "Metropolitan Districts" have essentially the same
> administrative powers/functions as a unitary authority, then I think
> they should be tagged with the same admin_level (i.e. 6) to reflect
> that fact. We'd then be consistently using admin_level=6 for the
> highest tier of local government. If they are slighty different (i.e.
> some powers rest elsewhere) then maybe we could consider using
> admin_level=7 instead. As far as I can tell, they're definitely not
> similar to the district councils under a normal county council, so iI
> think it would be better to avoid using admin_level=8.
>
>  Sounds reasonable to me. They are missing various powers of a true UA,
> which are organised at a "Metropolitan County" level in "joint boards". So
> admin_level=7 would reflect that intermediate level.
>
> Ceremonial counties are a completely separate division of the country into
> Lord Lieutenancy areas -- see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_counties_of_England . So in OSM
> I'd expect to find these in existence over the whole country, not just for
> the Metropolitan Counties. Since they have no administrative
> local-government function, I wouldn't expect them to need or have an
> admin_level tag. Sometimes they'll be coterminous with a normal county
> (i.e. the area controlled by a County Council). In which case, I'd expect
> to see two different relations in OSM, one for each entity.
>
> That is how lieutenancies/ceremonial counties are currently tagged -
> boundary=ceremonial, no admin_level. Indeed, if coterminous with an
> administrative county, then two relations are needed. I believe many
> already exist like this. See:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/English_Counties (which I have tried
> to keep up-to-date) for an overview. It looks like there are still a few
> missing - I will work on that.
>
> To further complicate things, it seems that in a relatively recent
> development, there is now a "Greater Manchester Statutory City Region" with
> a "Greater Manchester Combined Authority" that does have some significant
> administrative functions. See
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Manchester_Statutory_City_Region .
> This region is coterminous with the Greater Manchester Ceremonial County,
> but is a different entity. As above, I'd expect the two identical
> boundaries to have separate OSM relations. One with boundary=ceremonial and
> no admin_level tag, and the other with boundary=administrative and an
> appropriate admin_level. The admin_level value needs to be greater than 5
> (English Regions) and less than the value we've used for the individual
> borough/city areas. So presumably we wouldn't be able to use admin_level=6
> for the "Metropolitan Districts" within Greater Manchester, so 6 can be
> used by the "Combined Authority".
>
> Hmm, I didn't realise that... Wikipedia suggests it may be modelled on the
> Greater London Authority, which limited, well-defined powers. There doesn't
> seem to be a relation for the GLA - but there is one (65606) at
> admin_level=6 called "London".
>
> Whether we should use 7 rather than 8 for the "Metropolitan Districts"
> would, I think, depend on how much their powers/responsibility are similar
> to a normal districts within a normal county, and how much they retain more
> of the character of a Unitary Authority or other "Metropolitan Districts".
> Robert.
>
>  Colin
>
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