I live in the United Kingdom and a few years ago took part in a volunteer survey for my local council where we found and recorded as many benches as possible (sadly not on OSM). This brought to my attention the importance of knowing whether benches have armrests as well as backrests. Backrests offer support to people using the benches and armrests offer important assistance to people in getting on and off the bench - particularly those with restricted mobility. The council are looking to improve the accessibility of their infrastructure and so need to know accurate information about their current benches.
I have recently started to map benches in OSM and noticed that whilst many have backrest=yes/no, far fewer have armrest=yes/no. This is a fairly recently documented tag on the amenity=bench wiki page (I did not add it myself, although I have made several recent edits to this page) and is not included in the iD bench preset, which may partly explain its low usage.
I would like to encourage people to record armrest as well as backrest information for benches in OSM and would like to get a feel for whether using armrest=yes/no is the right way to do this.
A few of my own thoughts:
I donât believe it is of particular value to record the number of armrests so a simple yes/no should be sufficient
Some benches are specifically designed so a wheelchair user can get on to them and have only one armrest. This information can be recorded separately with wheelchair=yes rather than trying to deduce it from the armrest count.
There is an argument for recording whether people can lie down on a bench but I believe this is better recorded separately rather than trying to deduce it from the number of armrests.
Iâd appreciate peopleâs thoughts on this. It would be good to be able to achieve a consensus and then move forward to getting information included in presets and perhaps Street Complete missions etc.
backrest is fortunately already being used by StreetComplete in its quests. Addiing armrest it would improve the tagging of the benches, by the people who use StreetComplete on the go.
And yes, iD about to get it aswell, so I guess soon (if the approval doesnât get delayed enough).
I think we need some tags to define the numbers and positions of the armrests similar to handrail:left=*handrail:centre=* or with :lanes syntax, e.g. armrest=yes|yes|yes|no for a bench with an armrest on the left, two in the middle and none on the right side when sitting on the bench. But for a first shot I am fine with this simple tagging.
It may also be worth noting that some armrests are not entirely for the convenience of people sitting on benches - some are primarily there as hostile architecture.
True, the contortions Iâve sometimes had to make to get my feet thru the armrest loop so to be able to sleep or relax a bit in an airport between flights are more than a few.
Seeing it coming as with steps, handrail left, handrail right, handrail centre, some longer benches have centre or multiple off end armrests. Me custom JOSM preset will be ready to handle in no time, and no having to submit a ticket to get JOSM or the beautificator to make a change :o)))
I donât disagree with this and did touch upon it in my original post. However, there are still âgoodâ reasons for benches to have armrests and good reasons to record this data. I see the recording of things like whether one can lie down on a bench as entirely separate to this as you canât just deduce it from the number of armrests.
Thereâs a BIN at right and conveniently the glass wall is missing between seat 6 and the bin. Wrong way around as the soccer field is right behind them. Turn it around and you have a âsmallstandâ. The shelter certainly did not have a single marking it has a bus stop function, but then seen many hundreds along country roads mostly. Take a seat and the suburban or extraurban will stop. BTW not a construct to have a stretch and take a wink.
Is this not a bus stop? In which case it is highway=bus_stop and bench=yes. I would map the bin separately as it is not an integral part of the the bus stop.
I donât believe there is currently a way of recording backrest and armrest information for such seating.
Todays cycle survey âharvestâ included this âartworkâ with translated words by Kofi Annan on violence against women⌠It stands since 25.11.2021 in Caramanico Terme, passed quite a few times, never paid special attention since the little town has many streetside dressing pieces in all sorts of forms.
Regarding the use of armrests as hostile architecture. This is commonly refered to (online and in the US at least) as a âmiddle barâ âmiddle armrestâ âcenter barâ etc. so adding that as a separate tag would be good.
Whatever itâs configuration, it is still a shelter containing a bench. I would map seats using the lanes method as suggested earlier, backrest=bucket|bucket|bucket|bucket|bucket. Someone else is welcome to suggest a better for bucket style seating.
Any information recorded about a bus shelterâs bench would need a prefix to show that it applies to the bench and not the bus shelter. Something like bench:backrest etc
If you did want to record the pictured âbenchâ using the currently documented tags I would say it was bench:seats:6, bench:armrest=no, bench:backrest=yes. I would not try and put information about the type of individual seat into the backrest tag. This would need something new.
Mapping bus shelter seating types and individual seat information is likely quite complex. Iâd prefer to keep this thread more on the topic of standalone bench armrests if thatâs okay.
If you want to get into detailed tagging you can create separate objects for the shelter (amenity=sheltershelter=public_transport), the bench and the bin and add all three as members with empty role to the stop_area relation of the bus stop.
