The title of this thread is courtesy of this article, which, among other advice, suggests that:
Check online databases and maps … Additionally, mapping applications like Google Maps can help identify impound lots or towing yards in your area. Utilizing these online resources allows you to easily access the necessary information to determine where your car has been towed, saving you valuable time and effort.
Well, as far as I can tell, OSM does not have dedicated tagging for those lots. On the Wiki, I found a mention of Key:service:vehicle:towing, but that’s presumably for companies that offer towing as a service. Taginfo search for ‘towing’ comes up rather empty.
If I did not miss anything, it would be prudent to propose something like amenity=towing_yard. Ideas?
Having discovered that “impound” is a more precise term for “towed away by authorities” (w:Vehicle impoundment), I found police=car_pound, with 160 uses worldwide. However, towing is rarely executed (but often overseen) by the police, so I’m not sure if it was the best tagging combination out there…
Anyway, not being aware of the “(im)pound” wording, I had a hard time locating the information on the Wiki. I would not like to test my searching capabilities if I was to find my towed car…
I found police=car_pound, with 160 uses worldwide. However, towing is rarely executed (but often overseen) by the police, so I’m not sure if it was the best tagging combination out there…
these police tags seem generally odd, „police“ should rather describe a type of police (looking at the usage, it partly is like this, and police:FR even more), as it looks like a subtag for amenity=police.
It may be useful to document synonyms on the police=car_pound wiki page, using RelatedTerms, to help futur users searching…
Something like {{RelatedTermList|{{RelatedTerm|impound}} {{RelatedTerm|towing_yarg}} {{RelatedTerm|towing}} }} might do the trick.
Also, adding to the description is always a good idea I think.
It’s merely similar to military= , although landuse=military is not an individual PoI feature as amenity=police is. On the contrary, =police can also be said as the odd one instead, not being =police_station as =fire_station does.
That also crossed my mind, but it does not really fit with other uses of depot (bus, tram or truck storage). Besides, depot requires a landuse top-level tag and none of the established values is appropriate (commercial or industrial). Plus, I’d like to use an established tag combination if available.
In my city, there’s a single towing yard, operated by a municipal corporation. There is a small police office with one or two officers who issues fines and assists the operators, but they do not run the place. I suppose that in many other places, there is no police present whatsoever. However, if police=car_pound is the best one available, so be it.
(police=car_pound was introduced in 2019 as part of the proposal for classification of non-public police facilities. Being recent, and a bit unintuitive, explains its relatively low usage count.)
I think landuse=commercial would work. Having a car towed is a service (to the individual/company/government where the car is obstructing/not allowed or to the financing company if this is a “repo”). The owner then has to pay to get their car returned (a kind of service). Seems to me that an impound is basically a private car park for the commercial towing business.
