Recently I've been trying to improve the distribution of place=village
versus place=town in my area. Originally municipalities were tagged
based on their populations, resulting in clusters of place=cities in
urban and suburban areas and a desert of place=hamlets everywhere else.
And there's a lot of "everywhere else" in Ohio and Kentucky.
Generally speaking, I've been promoting the county seat and other
significant municipalities in each county from place=village to
place=town. The result is 1-2 place=towns in each rural county, a bit
more along Interstates. It looks nice on the standard map, but more
importantly, it accurately reflects what "going to town" means in the
surrounding area. That seems to be the idea behind the wiki's nebulous
definitions. [1]
Meanwhile, over in Indiana, one mapper has been turning virtually every
place POI into place=town, even unincorporated places with nothing but a
house or two. [2] I'm sure that's too extreme, and I just reached out to
the mapper to say as much. But after browsing various parts of the U.S.,
I think we've all got different ideas of what a city, town, and village
ought to be. Some metropolitan areas have lots of place=city POIs, while
in other places 3-4 U.S. routes converge on a place=village.
I think we should reserve place=city for the focal point of each
metropolitan area and distribute place=town more evenly across the
landscape. Just as the highway tag summarizes disparate tags like
surface, maxspeed, and lanes, the place tag holistically sums up
admin_level, border_type, and population (and the admin_centre role for
county seats). So for example, the Walden County seat (population 900)
and a Bigopolis suburb of 15,000 should both be place=town.
Or has everyone settled on a different standard? Sometimes it's hard to
tell whether the state of the map is due to a long-ago import to be
fixed or a community consensus to be respected, and the wiki hedges too
much to be helpful.
[1] http://wiki.osm.org/wiki/Key:place
[2] http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/6VW
--
[email protected]
_______________________________________________
Talk-us mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
