Leisure=schoolyard - is it a good tag worth promoting?

Mateusz_Konieczny · 2024-08-08T17:36:21.843Z

There is Tag:leisure=schoolyard - OpenStreetMap Wiki tag that seems reasonable to me. But, partially because it is kind of micromapping it is used relatively rarely.

At Add leisure=schoolyard by TurnrDev · Pull Request #134 · openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema · GitHub it was proposed to add it to presets but maintainers are worried that there are some possible problems with it as it is relatively rare and have not went through proposal process.

Are you aware about any issues with this tag that should result in it not being promoted by presets? Or is it a fine tag worth supporting for example in iD presets?

To quote some concerns from Add leisure=schoolyard by TurnrDev · Pull Request #134 · openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema · GitHub

I was comparing it to building=school, which one could consider to be around at the same micromapping-level (going with the example diagram given in the wiki for leisure=schoolyard), and I assumed that most schools in reality consist of a similar number yards as of buildings. But perhaps its that’s a bit “unfair” to the poor non-building tag.

The main problem I have with accepting this relatively new tag (again, compared to its school related map feature siblings) is that it didn’t undergo a proposal stage is that it could always be the case that it turns out to be “problematic”. Maybe the leisure is suboptimal, and something like landuse=schoolyard would have been the better choice. Or maybe these places would be better mapped as a special kind of playground (e.g. leisure=playground + playground=schoolyard) or even as a pedestrian area (thinking about it… something like highway=pedestrian + area=yes + pedestrian=schoolyard + access=… would even work to bad from a routing point of view). I just don’t know.

FWIW, JOSM also doesn’t have a preset for leisure=schoolyard at the moment.

une_abeille · 2024-08-08T23:54:04.213Z

This is a tag I have saved in my list of “handy but hard-to-find” tags. I think it is needed — I often come across entire schoolyards tagged as leisure=playground and this is definitely not correct given that they’re usually just plain asphalt, and often contain playgrounds.

As to whether it should be leisure= or landuse=, I am ambivalent.

Minh_Nguyen · 2024-08-09T02:00:35.377Z

tyr_asd:

thinking about it… something like highway=pedestrian + area=yes + pedestrian=schoolyard + access=… would even work to bad from a routing point of view

I think this misses the point of the tag. A schoolyard isn’t a navigable feature any more than a basketball court or swimming pool would be a routable feature. Few schoolchildren would ever obey precise instructions as to how they should navigate a blacktop at recess. (An introvert like me might hug the edge of the blacktop, as every major router currently does with pedestrian areas, but that’s a different matter for another day.)

Minh_Nguyen · 2024-08-09T02:22:04.209Z

Mateusz_Konieczny:

Are you aware about any issues with this tag that should result in it not being promoted by presets?

Several objections have been raised on the talk page in the past, but I suspect that much of it stems from mappers’ unfamiliarity with this kind of space from their own childhood, which led to misleading documentation at times. Every school is slightly different, even in the same region and at the same grade levels. I happened to attend one elementary school that had an easily identifiable space of this kind, next to the playground, and later another school in the same town that did not have one.

It doesn’t help that “schoolyard” is a term that in some dialects of English can also refer to the overall landuse=education. For this reason, I personally tend to refer to one of these spaces as a “blacktop” in conversation. But that’s a slang term that’s even less suitable for a tag value. (Most of the blacktops I’ve mapped are far from black. What school can afford to keep it in such good condition?)

willkmis · 2024-08-09T03:59:22.523Z

I also semi-frequently use this tag, so clearly by practice I support it as a valid mapping. I agree with others that it fills a niche no other tag covers: leisure=playground is inappropriate for the spaces in mind, and highway=pedestrian even more so. It probably helps that such well-defined schoolyards/blacktops are common in regions I’m familiar with though (i.e. urban areas of the US).

I think leisure is probably a better key than landuse, though it’s not a particularly strong opinion. Much more important is that the current key is already in use around the world. I definitely support adding it as an iD preset as I’ve had to manually type the value in iD many times while micro-mapping schools.

SztupY · 2024-08-20T18:38:45.323Z

Just mapped my wee one’s local school based on the wiki. I did use the leisure=schoolyard tag quite extensively based on the wiki suggestion to map anything that’s neither a pitch not a playground, but found out that they weren’t rendered, so the end result looks quite plain - even in case the surface tag is added to differentiate the grass and the asphalt parts of the schoolyard. Would definitely good to have it rendered properly, but if people go against it then it would be better to remove all mention of it in the wiki as it’s very misleading right now.