How should we tag junk yards / salvage yards / scrap yards?

Jt0 · 2020-08-11T18:27:02.000Z

I’m mapping a junk yard and am a little confused about how to handle tagging the main office.

Here’s what I’ve got right now:

I’ve mapped the service roads inside the yard, the boundaries of the yard, and the main office building. I’ve got the service roads tagged with highway=service, access=customers, motor_vehicle=no (only employees are allowed to drive motor vehicles on them); the yard boundary tagged with landuse=industrial and industrial=scrap_yard; and the main office tagged with building=yes. The top right corner of the yard is restricted to employees only, so I’ve set access=private for the service road that passes through that corner.

My first thought is to put the rest of the business tags (e.g. phone, address, opening hours) on the main office, since that’s where customers need to go before proceeding into the yard. But there’s no tag that I know of to describe the shop/amenity/service provided by the office; according to the OSM wiki, industrial=scrap_yard requires landuse=industrial (which doesn’t belong on a building). There’s also shop=junk_yard, but it seems to be very rare and discouraged. If I go without one of those tags then data consumers have to process whether or not the building is inside a landuse to decide what kind of business it is, otherwise it’ll just show up as a building with a name.

What should I do here?

kucai · 2020-08-12T05:52:28.000Z

Would tagging landuse & industry on the boundaries work for you?

SimonPoole · 2020-08-12T06:51:49.000Z

The problem is that scrapyard is a victim of intensive wiki fiddling and conning the iD developers in to dropping the tag.

amenity=scrapyard was in common use https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=scrapyard#values prior to the above (it used to have far more use than now) and would seem to be the obvious choice for a facility that provides such services publicly, contrary to simply tagging the landuse. So my solution would be to add a node with the tag in the appropriate place and adding the business tags to that.

Simon

Kovoschiz · 2020-08-12T07:10:44.000Z

I would tag motor_vehicle=private for “only employees are allowed to drive motor vehicles on them”. This is consistent with your understanding of “The top right corner of the yard is restricted to employees only, so I’ve set access=private for the service road that passes through that corner.”.

I don’t see where “shop=junk_yard” seems to be “discouraged.”. Problem is, it may not be considered a “shop” (not alone in regards to this). While there’s amenity=scrapyard (this has been voiced out in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:ID/Controversial_Decisions#Why_deprecating_amenity.3Dscrapyard_is_clearly_wrong.3F), more critically I wonder whether it can fall into recycling activities.

The office=yescan be tagged amenity=customers. This could suffice. There are more specific values at single-digit instances https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/compare/office=scrapyard/office=scrap_yard.

If it is built as an office building, building=office; otherwise building=* + building:use=office.

“according to the OSM wiki, industrial=scrap_yard requires landuse=industrial (which doesn’t belong on a building).” is not entirely correct. It can augment building=industrial, in lieu of a better direct value. The point is it doesn’t represent a single shop/business, only a building or site/facility. It could house multiple shop/businesses, or be used by only one partially.