I’m visiting every* playground with my child and mapping the equipment/details, it’s great fun!
Some turn out to not be accessible playgrounds, occasionally I expect that. If it’s play equipment within school grounds, I don’t think I should be finding that with a leisure=playground query. I want to delete these, but make sure they are covered by the amenity=school area (I.e. within the mapped school). I suspect most were mapped as playgrounds remotely (as part of a quarterly project?) and didn’t get any local context.
The OSM Wiki is confusing because it talks about school yards “usually without play equipment” and not school yards with play equipment. Tag:leisure=playground - OpenStreetMap Wiki
In British English, it is common to refer to a school yard as a playground. Use leisure=schoolyard for open areas in schools used for recreation but usually without playground equipment.
What’s the consensus: should a school playground (with equipment) be mapped as leisure=playground?
If there is a physical playground (in the OSM sense) that can be publicly observed (either in aerial imagery or on the ground) then I don’t see why it shouldn’t be mapped as leisure=playground. If it’s not accessible to the general public, then it would be good to add an appropriate access=* tag too.
Edit to add: Mapping and adding an access tag is arguably safer in the long run than not mapping at all. If a playground in a school not mapped at all, there’s a danger someone else will come along later and map it and not add the access tag.
The problem is that it’s not a playground, just play equipment in a school’s grounds. It’s not a leisure facility any more than a school’s toilets are a public amenity. In most cases, even the pupils at the school aren’t allowed to use them at any other time than when in school. (Source: I work in a primary school).
Thinking of it another way, if someone queries the data to find out how many public playgrounds there are in a particular area, are they going to realise they need to exclude the ones with access=private on them to get an accurate number?
We should, of course, make all this clear in the wiki and any editor docs.
The same argument could be made for private swimming pools but these are mapped (and tagged as private, see Wiki). Admittedly, not quite as common here as in other countries!
My point was the tag for a swimming pool is leisure=swimming_pool regardless of whether it’s a pool in someone’s backyard or as part of a publicly accessible facility. It’s the access=private tag that does the important clarifying.
The clue’s in the name: “public playgrounds”. The very first thing people are going to do is exclude any playgrounds with access=no, access=private or access=customers. All sorts of things are mapped using amenity= or leisure= despite being private and not a public amenity; you shouldn’t get too focussed on the literal meaning of the word ‘amenity’ being used in conjunction with something on private property.
Hello from the person in the note!
My view on this is that the play equipment area was clearly delineated from the leisure=schoolyard (fencing and/or significant surface differences that I could see on Bing imagery), thus warranting a separate leisure=playground area, with the appropriate access tagging to delineate that it is not accessible to the general public.
Having just double-checked the leisure=schoolyard wiki page, it seems to document that there can be a separate playground area within the school area overall, but it is definitely poorly documented.
That’s not the first thing I did. Although I should probably know better and will alter my query. Without being involved in each school, I don’t know how I would decide where it ends and a school yard begins, but I can leave that to another (ideally local-knowledgable) mapper.
I’ve had some other interesting edge cases:
Playground looked privately part of a mosque that you enter by walking through the playground. It’s not, and it was wonderful.
Playground that’s not in the council dataset. Probably installed by the housing developer but unknown. We agreed to map that with a note.
Playground on a church site that is accessible to the public. I will check the attitude from church staff, but I wonder if it’s access=permissive.
If we follow this literal reading of OSM key names to an absurd extreme, is a private school even a “public amenity”? Should we not map it as amenity=school?
I’m very much inclined to separate school yards from equipped playgrounds. What I have noticed is that the playgrounds are often for the very young children and that there are physical as well as social / psychological barriers.
The lies that we were told as children!! The biggest problem being that people repeat them as adults.
If I’ve understood correctly, we’re talking here about whether to use leisure=playground to map actual playgrounds (the types with proper play equipment) that are within school grounds, and hence aren’t open to the general public.
I don’t think there’s any debate that “school yards” (even if usually referred to as “school playgrounds” in the UK) should be tagged with leisure=schoolyard and not leisure=playground.
Although it went on a tangent, for me this discussion has now concluded.
If consuming leisure=playground data, you should consider access=* tagging.
Play equipment within school grounds should be tagged with an access value of some sort as it is not open to the general public.
Features within school grounds will be best mapped by users/staff of the school (the on-the-ground value of OSM). Play equipment and school yards may be used by different ages/years, the boundaries between them may only be clear close up or when being used.
The only niggle I would add to this, is that some school yards, certainly in Edinburgh leave there gates open and so the play equipment is accessible outside of school hours and during holidays. So access=no, access=private or access=customers won’t always reflect the situation on the ground.
That’s an interesting one. Are they locked during term time when the school is closed?
access=complicated? With description or some field to explain it. I think it should have something in the access tag.
I don’t know if opening_hours can do school holidays. If there’s enough tagging to explain the situation, then someone looking at the specific playground should understand it. If anyone does more with leisure=playground (besides fading the style on access=*) then the correct tagging will need to be defined.
You can use SH in opening_hours in the same way as PH works, for example …; SH Mo-Sa 09:00-12:00
Of course it’s hard for a data consumer to use this data as school holidays change every year and are different in each county, but it’s a human-readable value at least.
I would always default to using access=private for school playgrounds to avoid giving people the wrong idea.
The biggest problem being that people repeat them as adults.
With description or some field to explain it. I think it should have something in the access tag.