Greetings everyone.. I have a stake in this discussion, being resident in CA and dealing regularly with the representation of the various state and local parks, Open Spaces, Ecological Reserves, water company lands, National Parks and Forests, etc, etc, with which this state is blessed. It's a crazy patchwork quilt of what are all, essentially, protected lands.
I'm broadly in agreement (I think) with Bradley White and other earlier posters and less so with Steve. My take is that "parks" differ essentially in their level of protection, and there is a whole spectrum of protection levels. These levels are already well described by the boundary=protected_area tag set. Protect_class encompasses a range from legally designated wilderness down to local urban parks (plus special-purpose areas). Protection_title=*, operator=*, and name=* capture information about the responsible jurisdiction (you can throw in "park_type" if you like, though it seems superfluous) and access=* (along with mapped trails, etc) describes the area's availability for public recreation. I don't think we need to embark on some big new program to determine how to map California's parks - we already have the means to do so. The boundary=protected_area might need some tweaking for national or local peculiarities and some discussion about what protect levels apply to what types of CA "parks", but it's already there and it works and we should just use it. Protect_class is not just some abstract value of interest only to professional ecologists. The general "personality", and type of recreation available in a given park - ie, whether you take your dog and your kid in a stroller to picnic and play ball, or whether you carry survival equipment, bear spray, a PLB and GPS, or something in between - is strongly correlated with level of protection. And given this, the importance of the leisure=park/nature_reserve tags for understanding "what kind of park is this?" is greatly decreased. If I can throw in a note of cynicism: I have long suspected that there is a lot of deliberate tagging for the renderer going on in this whole business. I suspect the propensity for tagging anything with the word "Park" in it's name as leisure=park (given the wiki definition, seriously ?) stems from a belief by some mappers (no names) that the map is improved by fill-coloring all protected lands a light shade of green (It's gone so far that someone has been putting leisure=park on National Forests in Humboldt County). This is a terrible idea - apart from being totally counter to the wiki definition, the uniform green coloration of "parks" at medium to high zooms is incompatible with describing land cover characteristics with natural=* or landcover=* IMHO, AT THE VERY LEAST, the background green fill for leisure=park could and should be dropped by openstreeetmap-carto - it is unnecessary, causes problems, and can be replaced by natural=* or landcover=* . This would reduce one incentive for inappropriate use, and if still used inappropriately, it wouldn't matter so much. While on the topic of rendering "parks", I do agree with Steve (again, if I'm understanding correctly) that it would be valuable, if possible at some point in the future - both for map clarity as well as providing useful information to users - for carto to use different colors for different types of boundaries. I differ with Steve in that IMO the coloring should be based off protect_class (or at least for several bands of protect_class if there are too many distinct values for separate colors) rather than jurisdiction. Jurisdiction is less meaningful to users than level of protection, and in any case is usually obvious from the area name and other tags. Further, boundary rendering should indicate access restrictions (access=yes/no/permit) by some means - perhaps a dashed line as is presently done for highways. Happy New Year to all! _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
