Question about vending machines in OSM

General talk Tagging general discussion
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  1. Why are vending machines not rendered on OSM map?
    More info on vending machines can be found here:
    Category:Vending_machines
    Key:vending
    Taginfo vending
    Taginfo vending machine
    Overpass turbo vending machine for searching vending machines in OSM.

  2. Can you also use vending machine in combination with Key:shop? Because there are shops where they only have vending machines…

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If you are referring to the Standard layer, some vending machines are rendered (parking tickets, public transport tickets, excrement bags).

Would you want to see a generic vending machine rendering for all types? That seems to be what OsmAnd does, for example. I’m not sure it’s that useful, as it shows e.g. a cold drinks vending machine in the same way as a parking ticket point.

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… was discussed here

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These are 2 different questions. Spamming links don’t help.

  1. As always, there’s no “not rendered in OSM”, but it’s the style (Carto) of the default layer showcased. The rendered vending= are already documented prominently. Tag:amenity=vending_machine - OpenStreetMap Wiki
  2. Dedicated space for machines is a common question for many features. There’s no good answer, except drawing the building= , indoor= =room or =area , and landuse=retail when applicable.

The immediate problem is =vending_machine etc are defined as individual machines. And there are large machines that can be drawn as areas, depending on definition.

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The issue with shop=convenience now is there are unattended shops with the usual racks. They can be distinguished with vending machines, eg by the variety, possible requirement of registration in some, and different usability depending on the quantity purchased. So at least they need eg vending_machine= =only or =no , but this may risk redefining and misleading.

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But if I take a look @ Proposal:Vending machine there it says how its needs to be rendered, the proposal is approved. So why isn’t it rendered when you look at OpenStreetMap?

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Are indeed 2 different questions, have changed the name of the topic so it is clearer as well as the post in the topic itself.

Hence my question

I wonder shop=vending_machine may be used in the case of multiple vending machines in the same space?

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Map style maintainers can be, bluntly speaking, rather stubborn at times and just because things are accepted doesn’t mean it’ll be automatically visible on Carto, not even common elements, not niche ones like indoor or railway mapping.
highway=busway is another infamous example where the Carto maintainers still haven’t implemented the rendering thereof[1] despite the fact that it surpasses the use of related tags which were sometimes used in place before such as highway=bus_guideway and most other tools (e.g. iD, JOSM, StreetComplete) have been supporting it for quite while.

  1. twice, in fact ↩︎

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The OSM wiki is supposed to document the project, not tell the rest of the project what to do. Any “proposed rendering” for new tags there are essentially fictional.

If you’d like to see what projects (including renderers) say they use particular tags, look at taginfo - there you can see 40 or so projects, including renderers, that will try and do something with vending machines. Here is one example (the map legend for one of mine), and that illustrates the technical problems with showing these features that other people have already talked about:

  • Vending machines are small
  • They’re often close together
  • They do very different things

To tell apart the necessarily small icons for different sorts of vending machines, a map needs to support high zoom levels to allow people to see each one individually. Perhaps have a go yourself at showing the different sorts of them on a map, so that you can see the problem?

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  1. From above mention, notably the Shortbread vector style renders all =vending_machine generically. You should be able to see them. https://pnorman.github.io/tilekiln-shortbread-demo/
  2. Semantically, the German discussion has already raised the funny thought experiment of shops selling vending machines as shop=vending_machine . At least it’s not the clearest. You can’t show the category by blocking shop= . vending= is the specific items. In use, it may be confused as a mistake of amenity=vending_machine .
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Apologies for “vector tile pedantry” :slight_smile: , but the Shortbread schema doesn’t “render” anything; it just defines the data to be extracted. The vending value is included in that data. It’s the “Versatiles Colorful” style that chooses to show them all the same. If you hover your mouse over those POIs in a debug map style, you can see the different values.

To show these sensibly in vector map style based on “Versatiles Colorful”, you could:

  • Take a copy of that style (it’s just a .json file read by an html page)
  • Change the maxzoom to more than 18 so you can zoom in to see them
  • Add a label to show the vending value for for amenity=vending_machine in the pois layer.
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