[Talk-us] Parks, again

[Bradley White]

> As you say "feel like Type 2" I think is where it fuzzies in my mind.  Parks go to 3, 4, even 11 and beyond.  Parks have a wide range of "experiences" besides 1 and 2.

So do roads. There are countless kinds of roads, with varying levels
of importance and physical features. Instead of using a catch-all
"highway=road" tag, and instead of tagging infinitesimal levels of
network importance (or any of the other countless possible metrics),
we develop a classification system that allocates all roads into a
small set of (semi)-easy-to-work-with-and-understand classes. Some
roads don't fit well into this system, true. It isn't always clean; it
can be ambiguous; it continues to be debated over, and that's fine.
But, for the most part, it has worked, certainly better than the
all-or-nothing alternatives would have.

I agree with previous posters that this is same case with parks. In
the same way that the fact that there is something different enough
about a freeway and a narrow county back-road to represent them
differently in the database, there is something different enough about
a park I would take a kid to play on the playground for an hour, and a
park that I can spend half the day mountain biking around in without
encountering more than a small handful of people, that I think they
should be differentiated between in our data. I don't think the title
given to a piece of land should necessarily have bearing on the data
representation, in the same way "Hampstead Heath" doesn't get
"natural=heath" just because it's in the name.

Currently, I use the tagging scheme detailed by Greg earlier. I am
certainly not opposed to using "leisure=park" along with a basic
classification tag, say "park=developed/undeveloped" or something, but
Greg's scheme has the benefit of using established tags with rendering
support that still more or less respect the definition and intent of
the tags. While "leisure=nature_reserve" has generally assumed some
kind of conservation status, I think the newish
"boundary=protected_area" tags do a much better job detailing land
conservation, and that "leisure=nature_reserve" is the perfect tag to
adopt for the type 1 parks which Greg talks about. These 'type 1'
parks are, after all, pieces of *nature* being *reserved* by a
government agency for *leisure* of the public.