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

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2019 at 5:12 PM OSM Volunteer stevea
<steveaOSM at softworkers.com> wrote:
> I myself have also used landuse=conservation (long ago) and/or leisure=nature_reserve (neither of which render, not really the point).

My understanding is that landuse=conservation is deprecated in favor
of boundary=protected_area.

leisure=nature_reserve does indeed render.

boundary=protected_area, I am given to understand, renders if the
protection class is between 1 and 6 (with 1a and 1b also rendering).

> > 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).

Some say that 'level of government matters' or that 'title matters' as
well, but I think that the right way to think about it is function.The
two parks in New York that enjoy constitutional protection effectively
function as if they were national parks in other countries, as do many
facilities in the US that are titled, 'National Monument' or even
'National Forest'. They conform with the Wiki definition of 'national
park'. I suspect that relatively few, even among the tourists who've
been there, could distinguish among the coterminous 'Sequoia National
Park', 'Giant Sequoia National Monument, and 'Sequoia National
Forest'.
There was a proposal in the 1960's to transfer control of the
Adirondack Park to Uncle Sam, which would have created the nation's
largest National Park at the time. It was tremendously unpopular and
never went anywhere, but it was recognition that the two systems serve
a similar purpose. Baxter State Park in Maine is more stringently
protected than the adjoining Katahdin Woods and Waters National
Monument, and its scenery is considerably more spectacular.

For New York's confusing array of facilities, I've been careful to
retain protected_area tagging, in case we should lose all the
arguments and have no other consistent tagging left to us.
Unfortunately, to have that make sense, I've had to choose
protect_class=21 protection_object=recreation, since they aren't
generally nature-protected areas. (I try to tag them case by case -
I've not done a massive botched import.) Since that protection class
doesn't render, we're little better off from the standpoint of showing
something on the map.

About half the array of facilities is represented in the table on
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NYS_DEC_Lands. Nothing there is
tagged 'park', it's all nature_reserve - with a handful of exceptions
(fish hatchery, historic site, and notably state forest). Multiple Use
Area probably *should* be the same as whatever we wind up deciding is
right for the typical 'state park' but right now they're nature
reserves.  The remaining half of the facilities are the State Parks,
State Historic Sites, and State Recreation Areas (maybe other titles,
too, I need to check my notes) that are administered by a completely
different department of the state government.

My personal worst case of 'city park' is one that would fall solidly
within the European definition of 'park' - except that, well, it's
sort of also a cemetery.  https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/1438926 I
made the somewhat arbitrary decision of using multipolygons that
follow the land use rather than the property line.

It's a mess, and it's what I've got.