[OSM-talk] place=small_town

[David Earl]

I noticed when doing the name finder that there are a number of places 
marked place=small_town.

Though not recognised on Map_features, I kind of feel the need for a 
recognised tag like this, between town and village. What do others 
think? I'll add something to the proposals page if there's any 
enthusiasm for it.

Having been working mostly in rural South Cambridgeshire over the last 6 
months, it seems to me there are two distinct kinds of village:

- those with a population of several thousand, generally with services 
ike a post office, primary school, several pubs, some shops, maybe a 
supermarket, sometimes a secondary school

- those with only a few hundred people, too many for a hamlet, but with 
few or no services to speak of.

At the moment, the cut off for town is listed as 10,000. But there are 
some places like Soham, Cambridgeshire (pop 9,000) which is (rightly) 
marked as a town. On the other hand, Bedford, also a town (pop nearly 
80,000, nearly as big as Cambridge) is in another league from Soham, yet 
  it really ought to show up pretty much as significantly as Cambridge 
IMO, and Sandy and Biggleswade to its east look similar but are much 
smaller.

Then to complicate matters, there's places like Hay-on-Wye in Powys, 
Wales, population only about 1,500, but is definitely a major market 
town with every kind of service because it is the centre of a large 
rural hinterland. (Even if we had small_town, I'd continue to label Hay 
as town because of this - it punches above its weight).

So whether it is small_town or large_village for the 1,000's or 
conversely small_village for the 100's, I'd quite like to see a way I 
can distinguish the larger rural settlements, often 2,500+ but sometimes 
smaller, which have more significance. This would allow us to have a 
somewhat denser rendering of place names at lower zoom levels (e.g. 12 
on both maps), without swamping them, and we can highlight the more 
significant places.

Examples in South Cambridgeshire which I would promote to large_village 
or small_town are: Melbourn, Linton, Swavesey, Cottenham, 
Histon/Impington, Milton, Fulbourn, Great Shelford, Sawston, Bar Hill. I 
might also want to downgrade Cambourne if there were an intermediate.

There's always a matter of judgement involved, and it isn't solely on 
population, but at the moment I think the granularity is too coarse.

David