Proposed import of City of Toronto Parks and Recreation Washroom Facilities

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An update on the plan to add in winter hours for park washrooms:

I looked through the data and it does seem like the City has used the “status” columns to indicate 96 washrooms that are closed for the winter (e.g. “Reason”=“Closed For The Season” in the city data). So the hours on those could be updated to reflect that they are closed November–April.

Unfortunately the inverse is not true: there are at least five washrooms where prior surveys indicate that they are closed Nov–Apr, but the status columns in the City’s data mark them as still being open. So definitively saying which washrooms are open in the winter won’t be possible until the City properly updates their data set as noted earlier in the thread.

The update noted above will cut down the number of “noted” City washrooms that need surveying from around 120 to around 30, so it’s still quite useful.

This is my plan for now, and I’ll leave it posted for a couple weeks before importing in case anyone can think of any errors in the approach:

  1. If opening_hours (or other relevant info e.g. in “note” or “seasonal” tags) shows that the winter hours have already been mapped via survey; no change.
  2. If it’s a park washroom (with opening_hours=“May-Oct 09:00-22:00”) and the City’s status “Reason” column is like “Closed For The Season”, then update the hours to “May-Oct 09:00-22:00; Nov-Apr 09:00-20:00” and remove the note prompting other mappers to check opening_hours.
  3. Edge case 1: if it’s not a park washroom and the City’s status “Reason” column is like “Closed For The Season” then it might make sense to update the “note” tag, or add seasonal=yes, but otherwise leave unchanged.
  4. Edge case 2: if the washroom is not yet mapped (e.g. may have been fully closed during the September import and has now re-opened), then import per the protocol already outlined.

Given the smaller number of nodes/ways affected, I’ll plan to do this in four changesets (one each for Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, and Central Toronto).

Changeset data etc. for the changes described above have been generated and uploaded here: Github: tallcoleman/toronto-osm-washroom-import > winter_hours folder

Please let me know if there are any important considerations I may have missed; otherwise, I’ll plan to do these updates on Saturday Feb 15.

Thanks!

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