[Talk-us] Parks in the USA, leisure=park, park:type

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

On Apr 23, 2019, at 10:02 PM, Tod Fitch <tod at fitchdesign.com> wrote:
> You are a brave person to try to get this organized.

That IS how it feels, thank you for that recognition!  I'm might be thought of as more of a single person initiating dialog (with my shoulders shrugged) than a full-fledged "organizer."  I suppose I'll find myself in whatever role the community offers and we'll all trudge through it together.  I don't think there is a "leader," more like a lot of opinions which deserve to be heard (making it yet harder) and wrapped up into what hopefully turns into a solution.

> I am not sure how one could make a blanket categorization based on the little part of the world I am familiar with.

The examples you give are all too familiar to me, yet I believe that OSM does a decent job of tagging all of them, with the exception that leisure=park being freshly more precisely defined dumps serious buckets of sludge into how things are presently tagged here.  And I suspect in many places, not just California or USA.

> You have contradictions: A city park that is a protected area, a national park that is basically a city park, a couple of county parks that fall on both sides, and land protected by a non-governmental entity.

It is complicated, I know.  We frequently tag our best, yet without more clear answers to the simple question "how do I tag a county park?" (except to slog through a decade of history and multiple wiki pages) I feel dejected, even exhausted.  I see no good solution forward.

> Closer to my new home, the Capistrano Beach Park (Orange County), the San Clemente city beaches and the adjacent Calafia State Beach (California State) are pretty much indistinguishable other than the color and style of the life guard towers. Why would you tag them with different park_level values?
> The park_level tag mentioned on your wiki page does not seem to give much information beyond what can already be provided by the operator and owner tags so I don’t see that this helps the situation.

The park_level tag is an "auxiliary tag" which is not the solution, it acts to supplement any operator/owner tags.  However, just as admin_level does, park_level could help rendering, meaning national parks could eventually render differently than state, county or city parks.  Whether the border is differently "dashed" or differently colored hasn't yet been discussed.

> Given the diversity here, it would not surprise me if the rest of the world has even more contradictions and exceptions to any simplistic rule we may come up with. Other than perhaps the “duck rule” (if it quacks like a duck, assume it is a duck). Maybe the local mapper(s) should be asked to decide if the park falls into the “protected area” category vs “leisure/recreation” category. That decision might involve non-binary information as many protected areas include provision for some types of limited recreation. And at least some urban/suburban parks include areas that are left as close to nature as possible for various reasons which may include protection for specific species, etc.

I know.  I understand that leisure=park being more narrowly defined is a step in the right direction, but it has the oddly contradictory effect of tagging what really are park-like entities much more difficult.  The conundrum continues.

SteveA