Adding a new category under Land Use Features

General talk
1

Is this possible.

I have noticed that many public spaces like squares, plazas etc do not show up properly in openstreetmap.

thanks
J

2

You are confusing OSM with particular renderings of the data, but not identifying which rendering you are talking about!

Public squares for people (not cars) should be mapped as highway=pedestrian; area=yes. If a particular renderer is not rendering them sensibly, when taking into account the intent of the renderer, you should raise it as a bug with the people responsible for that renderer. However, note that no renderer will attempt to render every feature present in the map. Some renderers may not consider such features important.

3

Plazas, in the normal, US, sense of shops surrounding a car park, should be landuse=retail.

A URL to an example of where you think things are going wrong would be useful.

4

The problem relates to Federation Square in Melbourne, Australia. The actual square sits within a larger public space so they appear as one space on OSM because both are highway=pedestrian. However, in edit mode you can clearly see the actual space, and the outline/boundary of the actual space is also there as an area.

I think the catch all highway=pedestrian is problematic because the public space that isnt roadway is not all the same.

5

I can only see one area with that name: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22963283 It seems to have been mapped too recently to have stabilised on the standard Mapnik layer.

There is a wheelchair accessible, bicycle rental station, which is considered an attraction, nearby, and with the same name. I don’t believe that all the tags can be true. For a start wheelchairs and cycles tend to be alternatives, and most cycle rental stations are functional. Although the strange wheelchair status pre-dates that, it looks like, about two years ago, someone overloaded the rental station with the square itself, rather than mapping that as either an area or a POI near the centroid. Maybe the wheelmap user was also confused. https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/760335648

I think you will need to describe the structure of the nested squares, and in particular, how you tell them apart on the ground. If one is the whole complex, including buildings, it should probably be mapped as landuse=retail, or amenity=attraction, as an area. One really needs to understand the structure better.