OSM Volunteer stevea <stevea...@softworkers.com> writes:
> It may be emerging that tagging boundary=protected_area (where
> correct) where leisure=park now exists and we delete it, begins to
> supersede leisure=park on many North American now-called-parks. I
> think that's OK, maybe even overdue. To be clear, there are plenty of
> "we now call them parks" which are more like protected_area boundary
> areas or maybe "it is what it is today, nothing more."
I think you are not saying that a proper leisure=park should be
protected_area, but that some things which are really protected_area are
mistagged as park.
Here I will mostly talk about leisure=nature_reserve sorts of places, to
include national_park sorts of places that would be
leisure=nature_reserve if we didn't have national_park tags.
I have two problems with the notion of boundary=protected_area:
1) The current landuse is one thing, and legal protection for the future
is another. Just because something is a nature reserve now doesn't mean
it has legal protection.
A town might own 300 acres of woods, have hiking trails, and have it
signed as "Foo Conservation Area". That's enough to tag it
landuse=conservation (because that's the current actual landuse) and
leisure=nature_reserve. But, 20 years from now, they might sell that to
a developer to buy some other land which has conservation value and
enough upland to build that new schoool they want. So in this case
boundary=protected_area is completely inappropriate.
2) boundary=protected_area is semantically confused, because what is
being tagged is not the boundary, but the status of the area within the
boundary.
Of course, there is a computer-sciency duality between a boundary and
the area within the boundary. From this viewpoint, things are entirely
equivalent. But, humans interpret tags other than according to the
strict tagging definition semantics, and they tend to treat
boundary=protected_area as being about the boundary, particularly in
rendering.
With admin boundaries, there is a sense of "the land inside is in this
town", but we have a long cartographic culture of drawing lines on the
map. These separate towns and states, for example, and it's understood
that this is a large feature and that shading them is not that useful,
except on small-scale maps where there is arbitrary coloring to
visualize that.
With leisure=nature_reserve, leisure=park, golf courses, cemetaries,
schools, etc., we represent them on the map by some kind of shading or
fill. But, boundary=protected_area is represented by denoting the
border, and this does not serve map users wel.
> I think the greatest thing to "shake out" of this so far is that the
> leisure=park tag can (and should be) frequently be dismissed in
> preference to boundary=protected_area. This alone will assert a great
> deal of sanity back into things around here. Whether we invent a tag
> called proto_park ('cause there are such things, the city council just
> hasn't budgeted or spent the money to build it into a more fully
> human-leisure-place, yet).
There is no sanity in boundary=protected_area! There would be in
area_protected=yes, if it were only used to describe areas that actually
have legal protection (easement or conservation restriction, state or
national And).
That aside, I think favoring boundary=protected_area for parks is a
major step backwards from separating separate concepts. What is on the
ground, and what the legal protections are against change, are separate
things and should be kept separate.
Arguably, National Parks are no more protected than a parcel of woods
owned by a town (absent any CR/easemetn/state conservation status)
because the owning body can change the rules in the same manner.
In contrast, formal conservation land owned by towns in Mass requires
permission of the state to take out of conservation status. And there's
the NY example, where the state government can't change things via
normal law.
But, it comes down to "how hard would it be politically", and that's not
really that useful.
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