Hello, I am relatively new here, and I want some opinions on something I came across. I found these parking lots that are formatted a little weirdly in my opinion, and I wanted to know if I should try to fix it.
As you can see, each row of parking spots is tagged as a "parking lot (Way: 630454636 | OpenStreetMap), and each spot where there is a tree or two is tagged as a “natural wood” (Way: 630454637 | OpenStreetMap).
While this looks nice, I was just curious as to if this is a good practice for mapping parking lots and the landscaping in them.
In addition, the user responsible for mapping this has gotten in a bit of an argument in the past regarding edits that comply with the norms vs looking nice (see the discussion on this changeset: Changeset: 117664623 | OpenStreetMap).
Single trees or pairs of trees on a parking place do not qualify for natural=wood or landuse=forest imo. Those trees should be mapped one by one with natural=tree. By doing so one would also avoid to cover half of the parking lots with forest areas.
The same applies for the small strips of green ending the parking rows. I’d say these strips with some shrubbery or grass do not qualify as “gardens” at all. There are many tags to specify such areas like natural=scrub, natural=shrub, landuse=flowerbed, landuse=grass etc.
On the parking bit, I generally see amenity=parking covering a whole parking lot, not each row. This may be a local to me thing, but it’s also what I generally see. There’s a way to mark invisible spaces too if desired.
For the natural=wood bit, that also seems weird, there’s ways to mark trees and gardens, I’d look at the wiki for what seems to match the best and suggest/retag as that. Natural=wood may fit though, not having looked myself.
Regarding the natural=wood tagging, while it is not in line with the initial meaning of the tag, in practise it is now very common, even so that the wiki definition has been adjusted. The tag landuse=forest is also widely used for the same purpose (tree covered areas) and equally questionable, from a semantic point of view, landcover=trees would be better, but as the devs of the osm-carto rendering style (aka “main map”) have decided to ignore the landcover tag, it will not result in satisfactory rendering and people are not adopting the tag (or are double tagging, which leads the carto team to telling that the tag is not needed because the things render also without it).
To summarize, I would keep these tree covered areas as this use of the tag is common practise (from a data perspective, one can see that they are too small to be actually “woods”, so there is not much of harm about it).
For the parking lots, amenity=parking with the parking=* (multistorey, surface, underground, etc.) specification, should be applied to the whole parking. For individual parking lots, amenity=parking_space is there. Eventually it could be used together with capacity to map rows of lots
