All the boroughs of New York City are currently tagged place=suburb.
Each of the current boundaries were created with that tagging about five years ago with the exception of Manhattan, which was changed five years ago from borough to suburb.
I propose they be changed/changed back to place=borough.
Not only are they referred to as the Boroughs of New York City, I think it also better matches the definitions in the wiki:
place=suburb
“Use place=suburb to identify a major area in a place=town or place=city with a distinct and recognized local name and identity. Suburbs may have uncertain boundaries, may overlap with other suburbs, and are often best mapped using a node.”
place=borough
“Use place=borough to identify a part in larger place=city grouped into administrative unit. Depending on the country, suburbs in larger cities are often grouped into administrative units called boroughs or city districts (see boundary=administrative); using the place=borough tag avoids name confusion in countries that declare districts within their states or counties (see place=district).”
In the U.S., place=* tags on boundary relations aren’t a best practice in the first place, since it conflates legal classification with a human geography notion of a place’s importance. The legal status is a better fit for a boundary’s border_type=*, while the label node should have place=* indicating something potentially different than the legal classification. I think the general sentiment for years was basically not to worry about the accuracy of place=* tags on boundaries, as they came from an old import that had plenty of other higher-priority things to fix. But it probably would’ve been more responsible to delete the tag rather than allow it to mislead data consumers.
Pennsylvania also has boroughs, but they mean something different than in New York: like towns but with a different form of government. The TIGER import tagged their boundary relations with border_type=boroughplace=borough, while the separate GNIS import tagged their label nodes as place=village. If we keep tagging the borough boundaries with place=*, then it should be consistent with the label node.
Unlike border_type=*, place=* is expected to have a roughly similar meaning across jurisdictions, so I agree with retagging the New York boroughs’ label nodes to place=borough, though place=suburb doesn’t sound that far off either. Ideally, we’d remove the place=* tags from boundaries altogether, but this requires ensuring that each place=* point is actually a label member of any boundary relation that corresponds to it. Unfortunately, there seem to be plenty of boundary relations for municipalities that lack label members.
Yes, ideally, though @ZeLonewolf had some misgivings about relying more heavily on border_type=* by doing so. I don’t see a problem with it myself, since a data consumer can get a place=* tag from the label member if it really wants it.
I don’t think changing the nodes of NYC’s Boroughs to place=borough is a good idea. Basically all the use of place=borough, per the wiki, is from two separate imports, in Pennsylvania and Galicia, Spain. In other words, it’s very uncommon organically around the world. This would essentially mean any application that wants to render the borough names of NYC has to specially treat it as a place value unique in the whole world (in the near-term, they’d disappear from the Carto and Americana OSM map styles, for example), rather than conforming NYC to the established and in use non-independent place hierarchy of suburb > quarter > neighbourhood.
I don’t really see how, say, The Bronx doesn’t fit this description:
And it fits much better with how places are tagged everywhere else. In general, OSM place values need not conform very closely with what the places are known by administratively, that’s what border_type is for.
I was assuming that places such as Flushing and Harlem were already place=suburb given the even more local neighborhoods within them. But apparently they’re already place=quarter, so I guess there’s no existing conflict. Personally, I’ve tended to use place=suburb for parts of a city that used to be smaller cities before they were annexed and have retained their distinct identities. This could describe the five boroughs, but at a different scale perhaps.
Nominatim seems to equate place=borough with place=town in some contexts and place=suburb in others.
The description of place=suburb doesn’t rule out The Bronx, but none of the “squishier” criteria applies: "Suburbs may have uncertain boundaries, may overlap with other suburbs, and are often best mapped using a node”, none of which is true for any of the five boroughs.
Again, that doesn’t rule out The Bronx as a suburb, but the description of place=borough seems to fit better: “suburbs in larger cities are often grouped into administrative units called boroughs” since there is a definitive administrative unit.
That might be correct.
I guess when I think about “suburbs” my mind goes to relatively small areas that are part of somewhere like Dayton, Ohio, or Orlando, Florida.
Behemoths like The Bronx, which would swallow Dayton whole, don’t strike me as a “suburb” in the same way.
Yeah, unfortunately the OSM/British English meaning of “suburb” is very different from the American English meaning. If we could go back in time, place=borough probably would have been a better choice for the name of the top-level sub-city place given the US/UK ambiguity. But alas, given that place=borough has 291 worldwide uses on nodes and place=suburbhas 137,000, that ship has sailed.
I agree with removing the place tag from the boundary and using border_type to capture the legal nomenclature.
Honestly, the borough nodes could even justifiably be place=city, and they likely would be if they were distinct municipal jurisdictions. This isn’t something I feel that strongly about though. They’re so close to the New York node (geographically) that making them really really prominent is not a huge render issue.
The five boroughs definitely fall within the city-parts place=* hierarchy. Some styles intentionally depict the parts of a city quite differently than cities themselves, regardless of size.
Particularly confusing: the five boroughs are precisely coterminous with counties. (They are vestigial counties. They have no legislatures, having ceded that authority to New York City. They have largely ceremonial executive branches. They do still have county courts.) Three of the boroughs have different names as counties: Brooklyn = Kings County, Manhattan = New York County, Staten Island = Richmond County.
As far as I know, the border_type is still there, and when I left things, the boundary relation was duplicated for the borough and the county (at distinct admin_levels). I’m agnostic about what type of ‘place’ they are.
The reason that the ‘borough’ and ‘county’ have separate relations is because three of the five boroughs have different names as counties. (Borough of Manhattan = New York County; Borough of Brooklyn = Kings County; Borough of Staten Island = Richmond County). If there’s another way for the data to represent that, have at it.
It’s not true that the counties have ceased to exist entirely; they have ceded legislative functions (and most executive functions) to the city, but they retain their own judiciary. A defendant arraigned in Queens will ordinarily be tried in Kew Gardens, not Manhattan.
