I recently checked the wiki and taginfo, and was surprised that there does not seem to be a preferred way to tag telephone poles, in contrast to power poles and lampposts.
Options in use are: 1) man_made=utility_pole - used 4 930, has a short wiki description: "A single pole supporting elevation of any of various and unspecified public utilities, such as power transmission, lighting or telephony" - so this can also include power poles or poles used for multiple types of utilities or lamp posts which also support wires. 2) communication=pole - used 3316 times, no wiki page https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/communication=pole 3) man_made=pole - used 2251 times, no wiki page 4) telephone=pole - used 1108 times, no wiki page https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/?key=telephone&value=pole User "Chippy" made a wiki page that documents the various tags in use for telecom lines, poles and cabinets, back in 2015, but none of the various tags seem to be approved or clearly de facto in use by mappers: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Telecoms#Telephone_Poles There is also not much tagging of telephone cables (or wires?), but there is a documented tag, communication=line - with a wiki page but no proposal, used 2550 times. This says "Only the main connections, mostly sea cables, should be mapped." https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:communication%3Dline Perhaps there is a need for a proposal to map minor communication cables, eg. communication=minor_line? Is there a need to map smaller telephone or utility poles? I don't have any personal interest in mapping this right now (I'm still working on rivers, villages and highways in my area!) but it seems similar to "power=minor_line" and "power=pole" in significance, and I suppose it's better to develop a good tagging system now. While using the key "man_made" would be easiest, perhaps the communication key is a good idea, parallel to "power"? _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
