Spent a little time wondering what I was doing wrong with tagging up bungalows that weren’t then turning up in StreetComplete to number and address. Turns out it’s not me - StreetComplete doesn’t consider bungalows a “building with an address”:
I would like to ask them to reconsider the decision, at least with regards to UK bungalows, since - at least by my view - a bungalow is usually a normal, single-storey house with an address attached (they can restrict this to the UK if bungalows mean something else in other countries, which it appears that they do).
Before I ask I wanted to check my thinking with the community and canvass whether or not this would be a change UK mappers would want to see, since the StreetComplete developers seem to be under the impression this change would be annoying (believing that the tag refers to significant numbers of non-addressed holiday homes).
It does appear as though the general definition/usage of bungalow in OSM doesn’t align with the UK’s usage. But there are other issues with using building=bungalow in the UK way too, particularly around specifying whether it’s detached, semi-detached, or terraced.
My personal preference for tagging houses in general is to use building=house + house=*. This way, we can tag a detached bungalow as building=house + house=detached + building:levels=1 but I appreciate not everyone likes this approach and it’s certainly in the minority number wise!
I would prefer building=house + house=bungalow personally, since it matches common descriptions - e.g. if you have a terraced bungalow, people would point at it and say “bungalow” not “terrace”. At least in my experience.
But iD tags “Bungalow” as building=bungalow (and “Semi-Detached House” as building=semidetached_house) so I guess we might be a bit late in filing all “single-family dwellings” under building=house.
Yep, but then if you were to want to know how many semi-detached houses (including semi-detached bungalows) there were in the UK, for example, you’d have to do some analysis of shared nodes rather than an simple OT query.
Swings and roundabouts!
iD is actually a mixed bag. If you search for and use the “house” preset then it uses the building=house tag and provides the house=* options in the editor.
I’m not really sure? I think possibly “bungalows” are used in other countries to mean unaddressed chalets, sort-of like static caravan holiday parks in the UK.
I guess I wanted to start with “Do we all agree that bungalows generally have addresses in the UK?”. In my head they do - maybe there are a significant number of unaddressed bungalows I don’t know about, but I think the confusion is that bungalows were traditionally holiday homes that were built in seaside towns.
Even static caravans and permanent beach huts can have addresses in the UK. I would expect all habitable bungalows to have one, linked to a council tax account.
I’m not introducing anything - that’s what they’re called, so that’s what people tag them as should we instead mass-edit all bungalows in the UK with that tag combo?
FWIW, I looked up ‘bungalow’ in Wikipedia and there’s little to suggest that there are many (any?) countries where a bungalow wouldn’t have an address. They certainly have addresses here in Canada.
We’ve got two main ways of tagging houses in OSM and a mass edit in the UK won’t stop data consumers needing to be aware of both. Which tags to use are dictated by personal preference or consistency with existing local mappers.
I wouldn’t change one from the other, unless it was reverting an undiscussed mechanical edit and backdoor deprecation, sorry I meant a “tag upgrade”, suggested by iD or Rabid.
My preference when tagging a house is the duck tagging approach, which is to tag is as building=house + house=detached/semi-detached/terraced for the type. If I point to a detached house and ask a passing stranger what it is, they’ll say it’s a “house” or a “detached house”. Nobody will say that it’s a “detached”.
Good point, I shouldn’t have got carried away and included bungalow in the list of values of the house tag which I might use (I’ll edit that), as I’d almost certainly tag the house you described as building=house + house=semi-detached when mapping initially from aerial imagery. Surveying or looking at street side imagery later, I’d just add building:levels=1.
I am nowhere near the sea but locally a high proportion of the housing
stock is bungalows. Mine certainly has an address, receives mail and a
council tax bill.
Most will have been built from the 1960s onwards. Quite a lot are semi-
detached, we also have a number of Dorma bungalows.
I have seen discussion of bungalows on allotments, but I think these refer to two situations:
Dacha, which are “summer houses” in Russia and some Eastern European countries. I don’t know if these have addresses but I would have assumed so?
Sheds which are a bit fancier than your standard 6x4 but are nonetheless sheds, with no bedrooms or plumbing or whatever else - these seem also to be sometimes tagged allotment_house.
Ah, but herein lies the problem with bungalow as a tag value: it means different things to different people. Witness for instance this question:
In Canada a bungalow is by definition a one-storey (only counting storeys above grade), single-family, fully-detached home, therefore the very idea of a “semi-detached bungalow” or “terraced bungalow” is nonsense.
Conversely in many places a bungalow is definitionally a house with only one storey and thus no stairs, inside or out. However, almost all ‘bungalows’ in Canada have full basement levels. To many this means a ‘bungalow’ in the Canadian context is not a ‘true’ bungalow because it has more than one storey. By convention we don’t count the basement in Canada—very often the basement is left unfinished when a house is built—but in many other places around the world you would count the basement as a storey of a home because… why wouldn’t you? You use it, and there’re stairs to get to it, so the idea of pretending as though it isn’t another storey is nonsense, thus a Canadian ‘bungalow’ is not a bungalow at all.
As such, I think the building=bungalow and building=house, house=bungalow tags are a bad idea to begin with. Almost certainly StreetComplete doesn’t check for whether a bungalow has an address because the tag is assumed to mean smaller vacation buildings (‘dacha’, ‘cottage’, ‘cabin’, etc.) or an accessory building not unlike a detached garage or shed.
should we instead mass-edit all bungalows in the UK with that tag combo?