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

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

Apologies if I've already answered these.

On Apr 24, 2019, at 4:34 PM, Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:
> I think Kevin has it right that we should tag primarily by something
> about land use, not by owne/operator, although it's fine to tag
> operator.

I 100% agree.  Yet I peruse landuse key values (except park is noted leisure=park, which means I'm chasing my tail so I ignore it) and find that none of them come close to describing "park" (the American English sense).  I myself have also used landuse=conservation (long ago) and/or leisure=nature_reserve (neither of which render, not really the point).

> I think the entire "national_park" tag is unfortunate, as it wraps up a
> lot of concepts that vary by country, and makes people understand things
> when they don't.  In the US, it should mean "preserve the land while
> allowing access and enjoyment", there is a notion that the place is
> relatively distinguished, and it doesn't really have a connotation of
> size.

Some say "size matters" with national_park, some say it's too confusing for size to matter.  It doesn't seem we're going to eliminate boundary=national_park anytime soon, as even though this shouldn't have mattered, it did:  this was a tag that rendered, so people used it.  (How rendering — presently, eventually, politically-within-OSM... — gets coupled to tagging is another chewy topic).

SteveA