Lane rental was(is?) a method of charging road repair companies for the time they took to complete work on UK highways. What it did for quality I’ve no idea. I suppose you could view the highway as property.
The flexibility of the English language would lead me to think that anyone saying any word is only used in any particular way is likely to be on dodgy ground, if only from ignorance.
How ‘set’ became so flexible could probably make a few PhDs if it has not already.
I don’t get it. 
As another native English speaker (not from Britain), “plant hire” is also clear and the correct term.
Can the non native speakers realised that English is a hot mess, and totally inconsistent, and stop trying to understand it from the first principles.
Believe me, I am used to languages being inconsistent hot mess where reasoning from first principles is like cat herding.
I am aware that it is happening with much simpler systems (look at page history who created this page) and for human languages English is far from being unique. And its degree of confusingness, complexity and hot messiness is often overstated.
For example depending on context “two” can be translated into Polish at least as
depending on conjugation, who knows what else, grammatical feminine/masculine/neuter form. “male” can be grammatically neuter in Polish in some cases, to say “nonbinary” in standard Polish grammar you may need to decided is it grammatically masculine or feminine and you have even more such language things. As far as I know similar happen in other languages.
Anyone irritated by how English is annoying should be happy that it is England, not Poland that established its power at some point to the degree that everyone else is learning English for international communication. Declination of word “two” is just start - and for 99% cases I can tell you which form is correct, but not why and how to apply it more generally.
(and I guess that this way at least English native speakers get to experience English mangled by Polish speakers rather than reverse, so it is not like I have no benefit at all from current arrangement)
It famously happens with intentionally designed languages, which are machine readable. JavaScript was repeatedly made fun out of it but you can easily find truly bizarre cases elsewhere.
so, no, this is not an attempt to create consistent English based on first-principles
I repeatedly suggested that doing it with much simpler and consistent OSM tagging schema is a pure waste of time (say, trying to define landuse key will bring a lot of frustration, and attempting to deny existence of landuse=grass)
I created this thread for two purposes:
sport=football case where ot was done)I am not trying to argue that English is consistent or to change English or to deny that “plant hire” term is in use in UK.
Yes, it is valid Commonwealth English. The Australians and New Zealanders use the term as well (to my understanding), but if you used in North America you’d probably get looked at like you have two heads if you didn’t have the accent to go with it.
It is somewhat ambiguous on its own, but is well-defined enough that changing it probably isn’t worth it.
Not many English speakers do either. ‘Set’ has something like 400 definitions. 
Just to add another datapoint, I’m a native (Australian) English speaker and “plant hire” makes me think of leafy green things.
I do occasionally see “plant” used to reference machinery. It’s rare though, and I always find it rather amusing (“beware of mobile plant” signage makes me think there’s a large man-eating plant on the loose ).
Anyway, I can’t help but feel that shop=plant_hire is an unnecessary footgun. Ideally editors/presets will make it obvious what’s meant, but raw tags are still exposed fairly often in my experience.
Thanks, this is what I have been referring to when saying
based on my experiences in Australia, Asia and Africa. Anyhow I missed out the mother country of OSM english so it is an imcomplete overview without doubt.
I also have to admit that someone searching the internet will find plant hire companies besides lot of equipment hire or also rental companies in Australia:
This small selection makes quite clear that plant hire is as official as equipment hire and that also the use of rent or rental for objects different from
is quite common (at least in Oz).
Taking these facts into account I withdraw my objection against shop=plant_hire and solemnly vow to make use of it at any opportunity arising in future.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that an, um, sibling project has the following principle:
note Proposal:Jewellery shop - OpenStreetMap Wiki - where for well established nonconfusing shop value rename was rejected, despite current used was non-UK version
We should not loose sight of the aim of our project: to make a good map. When choosing a tag value to describe something, this should be the primary concern, and what it’s usually called in British English is secondary. If we create shop=plant_hire and mappers start using it to add places where you can rent decorative greenery, the result will be a skunked tag. Others might not understand that shop=plant_hire is what they’re looking for, and may create shop=heavy_equipment_rental. So we will end up having two tag values describing the same thing, but one if them also describing something completely unrelated.
