In my city Cardiff someone has gone to the trouble of mapping individual bollards and more importantly individual trees which makes the map look very cluttered. Does anyone know if there is any guidance on this matter? I know trees are important! Maybe there is a survey being undertaken? My feeling is unless a bollard is linked to a line eg road then they should not defined individually if in a row.
As far as I understand, there is no limit to entering information to the database, except for the basic requirement of adding only geographical objects actually visible ; though I personally have a strong reservation about adding information doubly.
What the map looks like is quite a different matter, it should be discussed with the masters/mistresses of the renderer.
Whilst unusual there is nothing wrong with this. In particular we dont have good ways of mapping long lines of bollards (e.g., in modern anti-terrorism defences) without mapping each one independently. Equally individual bollards mapped but not connected to the way they obstruct may result in bad routing.
Mapping street trees is increasingly common. They presence on the map helps identify the ambiance of streets, possibilities for shade, and many people take an interest in the variety of trees which have been planted.
I have recently done a bit of mapping round St Fagans and noticed that trees have been mapped as areas not nodes. If this is true elsewhere in Cardiff, feel free to replace such mapping with a single node natural=tree (do preserve other relevant tags).
Most importantly: Never judge what should and should not be in OSM by the rendered map. It is only one possible set of choices and there is no guarantee that these will work everywhere. For instance the maintainers decided that urban footpaths were too prominent (at least partially because of some cemeteries in Krakow) and reduced their prominence on the map. The side effect was that the main render became much less convenient for walking in the countryside.
Lastly, when editing it is possible in some editors (iD and JOSM) to hide features so they dont obscure the thing you are mapping at the moment. In iD they are in the menu below the layer selector on the RHS.
Single trees you can replace with natural=tree_row
I am personally against mapping single trees unless they are a landmark (e.g. one tree in the center of a roundabout) or a natural monument.
I have been converting tree lines to naturel=tree_row and I have been asked why a lot as, like SK53 said, some people uses those. But even in the basic OSM view (not editing), trees are omnipresent.
Edit : Maybe tree_row with trees points inside ? Could be a solution but then what would be the point of adding tree_row ?
@joyclem: why? I did not recommend that at all there are plenty of specific use cases for individual trees in an avenue of trees (navigation by the visually impaired, biological recording related to individual trees - for instance presence of rare fungi or bird nests needed protection). Additionally, avenues may be made of of a variety of tree types, even when the intention was a single species. I know one where every tree but one is a Horse Chestnut, but when they are in flower it is obvious that the odd one out is a Red Horse-Chestnut.
Local to me someone has added tree rows which are not tree rows at all but just isolated trees: .https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/825907581.
The road I live is lined by trees forming 2 tree rows either side of the road. Unfortunately several trees have been affected by a pathogenic fungus. The ability to locate individual trees for reporting & mapping is invaluable.
Yeah have beeen talking about tose changesets with multiple other OSM contributor and I did do wrong. I’m in the process of reverting those changesets. If anyone want to help repair those mistakes, here are all the changesets I did :
Thank, and sorry <3