Pre-discussion to overcome the first major hurdle before I even begin drafting up a proposal.
To prevent any “popularity” biases please refrain from looking at taginfo until after you vote in the poll. The usage counts are still so low that it’s better to pick what’s right for the long term rather than what has been arbitrarily picked. Nothing is set in stone.
Researching the top towing tags revealed that these three different top-level keys have been mapped to refer to exactly the same thing and there is no reason to differentiate.
Which top-level key?
amenity=towing
office=towing
shop=towing
0voters
My effort of consolidating a ridiculous number of unique values has also landed me with these two values.
Which value?
*=towing
*=towing_service
0voters
I will be drafting the proposal and starting the RFC at a later date.
I voted office=towing assuming this would refer to the offices or business grounds of a company that tows cars: misparked cars, broken down cars, cars after an accident, or otherwise cars that are not moving by their own power. If OSM uses other meanings of “towing”, I don’t know.
On that, the business office can be in one location, the depot that the tow-trucks operate from at a different spot, & a yard that holds towed vehicles at a third!
Indeed, but I see little reason to tag the company on those. Name, maybe, if signed.
And personally I’d only tag office=towing if it was signed visible from the street and I was mapping the area. Otherwise it falls under my “OSM is not a business directory” rule…
I voted shop= because amenity= doesn’t need to be more polluted than it already is, and because office= to me generally implies, like, “desk space only,” not so much equipment storage
I can agree with shop= but how is amenity= being polluted a valid reason. Taking a look at the wiki under the transportation section Key:amenity#Transportation it looks like it would fit right in.
I would compare it to amenity=taxi and office=taxi. Since a towing company is generally something you call out, rather than visit, in my opinion it matches more a taxi dispatch office than a taxi rank.
I don’t know what others call it, but in my region the area that stores vehicles that are towed is referred to as an impound. I’m not sure if that’s in use on OSM or not.
There’s AAA of course, but then you got the ones who contract out to private businesses and or parking lots to take the vehicle to their impound lot and will be released after paying a normally exorbitant fee to have it released back to you.
I assume this thread is about the towing service itself, rather than a car repair shop or impound lot to which the service takes a broken-down or impounded car?
Lots of services have separate dispatch offices and depots – taxi companies, limousine services, school bus companies, ambulance companies. I agree that the basic point of interest is more important than the back office, though it would be great if we can choose something consistent with limousine services at least.
(I finally mapped a gas station’s office the other day. All these years, I never noticed the little “[Gas Station Name] Office” in a ramshackle house next door to the main property.)
Another complication is that some of the towing services I’ve mapped are based at car repair shops or car dealerships, so the service:*=yes tagging scheme is already a pretty decent fit.
I assume this thread is about the towing service itself, rather than a car repair shop or impound lot to which the service takes a broken-down or impounded car?
Yes this thread about towing service for business whose primary purpose is towing. There’s different kinds like recovery, enforcement, etc. Dealerships or car repair locations that happen to offer towing (complementary or not) is not relevant to this thread.
You’ll have to tune into my future RFC to hear all about it.
would it make sense to distinguish internal offices (office=company company=*) and places where clients may walk in? (shop=* or amenity=)
Big problem with office= values is mixing places where people can get into to obtain services and ones which are purely internal ones and offer no admittance to general public. See say office=government or office=lawyer
this is not a problem at all, and I do not get it at all why it is a problem
I can imagine why landuse=flowerbed may be frustrating to people who expect nice, clean and 100% reliable definitions of landuse key, but what is the supposed problem here?
it kind of misses “I do not care either way, I will support/use whatever will get proposed”, maybe as an extra option (with option to select multiple), for first one I also would be happy to select two of three proposed main tags
I have very slight preference, but if someone bothers to make proposal I am going to agree to not-so-idea ones (if everyone demands conflicting ideal versions according to them, it just blocks any attempts at all)
My view is identical to this. No strong preference, there maybe should be different tags for the place customers go to get their towed vehicle and the place customers call for service, but any standardized tag is good enough.
