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

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

James Umbanhowar <jumbanho at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just to throw another curveball in here, there is also
> leisure=nature_reserve which is frequently (occasionally?) used for the
> city/county parks that are less structured and used for hiking and
> nature appreciation.

Thanks, James.  Reiterating, when I say "Existing 4," (as "tags we use on park-like things"), I mean:

leisure=park
leisure=nature_reserve
boundary=national_park
boundary=protected_area

Number "4-1/2" (or a 5th) might be landuse=recreation_area, which sometimes, even according to its wiki, conflates with leisure=park.  But use landuse=recreation_area when appropriate, of course.

I hear (loud and clear) the unfortunate-ness of boundary=national_park.  I know an easy go-to fix might be "how about we Americans coin the boundary=state_park tag...".  Two things about that which I hope are enlightening.

1)  As states are as sovereign as the federal government (for purposes of saying "what a park is around here"), the tag boundary=national_park has rather widely been applied to state parks and state-park like lands.  (I know Kevin Kenny has made a good case for why he uses this tag on certain New York state "lands" of a certain sort.  And a lot of state parks in California and other states get this tag.

2)  Once we go down the road of state_park as a value on boundary, we'll begin to tag (if we already haven't, I could check taginfo) county_park, city_park, maybe even private_park and other oddities which "break" a strict hierarchy of government administration.  (My psuedo/proto-protosal of a park_level=* tag, with values that mimic admin_level goes here, but that's an aside).  We have sort of tried this with the park:type tag (noted in the Subject), and that has been so wide-open (since at least 2009) that it didn't even have a wiki page about it until I sketched in a loose one late last week.  (I'm dancing as fast as I can).  The park:type tag is a mess, and in my opinion should enter early stages of deprecation right now as I believe it is too free-form and confusing.  I mean, I'm all for coining tags and plastic values, but this one seems to have simply become overly messy.

Perhaps new tags (in addition to the Existing 4 or 5) are in order, so that we may better address the "unfortunateness" of boundary=national_park.  But it would have to be a quite-well-thought-out proposal, might NEED to include the concept of park_level (which can be supplemented by operator=* and/or owner=* tags), and should scale to the whole world of OSM, rather than be USA-specific.  I'm pretty sure, anyway.  Or maybe we don't need any new tags (maybe values?) and we simply need good "rules" (rough logical mappings, maybe tightened up over time, or state-by-state) to apply the Existing 4 or 5 that mappers in the USA agree are crystal-clear, if that's possible.

SteveA