[Talk-GB] Tagging of private parking in gardens

[Mark Goodge]

On 05/01/2023 14:52, Jon Pennycook wrote:

> I don't know how much of the parking areas mapped in Crowthorne at 
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.37392&mlon=-0.82582#map=19/51.37392/-0.82582 are actually used for vehicle storage.

That whole section is somewhat bizarre. It looks as though someone has 
gone out of their way to micromap absolutely everything on that housing 
estate, even down to the details of flowerbeds in people's gardens, but 
has then given up part way through. Go into edit and look at the aerial 
view, and half the houses on The Brambles (the next street to the east 
of where you've placed the marker) are missing.

Look at the detailed tags of those parking spaces, and some of them go 
into extraordinary detail such as the nature of the surface ("sandstone 
blocks", for example). But despite the fact that these are big, 
expensive houses with big, expensive grounds, the capacity tag for these 
car parks is always just 2 or 3. Which is ridiculous - you could easily 
get a dozen cars in most of them (look at them on Google Streetview).

I'm not at all sure that this level of mapping is desirable. For a 
start, it isn't sustainable - nobody can keep up with all the possible 
changes as people remodel their gardens and change the number of cars in 
their households. And, also, going into so much detail on some houses 
while leaving the rest entirely unmapped - not even outlines - gives an 
entirely false impression of an area. Looking at it on the website - any 
render, not just the default Carto - and this appears to be some kind of 
standalone housing estate with nothing else around it. Look at the 
aerial images (or, for that matter, any other map), and it's clearly 
part of the general urban area of the town.

I don't know what the solution to this is. But, whatever it is, I don't 
think this particular mapper's activity is a valuable guide to whether 
we should be mapping people's driveways as car parks elsewhere.

Mark