On 20/04/2025 09:17, John Rowbotham wrote:
I suppose I was just perturbed that talking to the designers, exploring the site as it was being built, understanding that the properties had storeys, parking access etc showing the 140 years' difference from traditional 2 up 2 down back-to-back terraces, might be something we could map at a top level to describe the setting more appropriately. 'We're not doing terraces!' the architect told me indignantly in 2012.
We do have a building:levels=* sub-tag which can usefully be used to differentiate between different sizes of house. But that may possibly be a little too deep into the hierarchy for most people.
We have codes for the number of poles on a sign so finding an ID editor code to differentiate connected housing seemed sensible: let's delete it so others don't mistakenly apply it. And also, I suppose that, as with the tens of thousands of edits I've done, I am there to set eyes on the buildings and talk to people on site...not, I'm afraid, on another continent.
I do think it might be useful to have some additional tags and tag values (not just building:levels=*) that make it easy to distinguish between different types of house that otherwise share the same physical basis. We do, for example, have a house=bungalow tag, which can be combined with building=detached or building=semi-detached (or even building=terrace; there are terraced bungalows) to indicate both the design of the house as well as the relationship with neighbouring buildings. So a similar tag value to indicate a large, multi-level terraced house would be reasonable.
The problem with "town house", though, is that it's not a universally understood term. Here in the UK, it's a particular subset of terraced houses. But in North America, town house (or row house) is just a synonym for what we call terraced. Given the potential ambiguity, therefore, it's probably best avoided as a tag value. An I don't have a better suggestion that would be intuitive enough for most mappers.
Mark _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
