Today I was reading the wiki pages amenity=boat_storage and shop=storage_rental and noticed what I would consider some major problems with the tagging scheme.
I have seen a great deal of these storage rental businesses appearing here in Alabama, and I wanted to make sure I am using the correct tagging.
The tag shop=storage_rental seems appropriate enough for the conventional climate controlled room rentals offered at most storage places. However, some facilities also offer long term parking rentals for RVs and boats. There doesn’t seem to be a good way to define whether a facility offers these kinds of services. The best I could find was using amenity=boat_storage, but this tag seems like it is more for an open area for laying a boat on the ground, and not a business where boat parking can be rented long term.
Does this warrant new tagging, and if so, what would be good tags?
You could also consider a distinction between parking your boat, where it remains on a trailer within a parking lot designed for long term use (for this I’ve used amenity=parking + trailer=yes), and boat storage where it’s placed on shelves or on the ground (especially if it’s just a small dinghy or small craft that one or two people can carry, although some take larger vessels via a forklift).
My main goal is to find a way to specify if a storage rental has the additional services of RV parking and boat parking. If there is a feature with just shop=storage_rental, I assume it denotes a facility that exclusively offers rooms for rent, not any additional storage rentals for RVs and boats, and I have no way of further specifying.
Around here, it’s quite common to have a mix of indoor & outdoor storage, & the wiki does actually say “Some storage rental facilities offer parking spaces for boats, recreational vehicles, or other vehicles.”
I guess you could do storage:boat=yesstorage:caravan=yes to indicate you can store those items there, but it becomes tricky to distinguish storing your boat on your own trailer on their open space, vs a covered space, vs in your own locked storage cage.
I found there is already a boat:* namespace Key:boat:* which I think could work well if it is extended to specify if a storage rental offers boat storage using a key like boat:storage, and could even specify if other facilities offer boat storage
Boat storage in this case would need to be well defined, something like: “Denotes if a storage rental, shop, or other business offer boat storage space for rent”