I’m looking at a couple of local developments which have parking for several cars a) on the same level as the street outside a building, but b) inside the building structure. We often call this arrangement “undercroft parking” in the UK. It can make buildings a little ugly and dead, so it’s covered in design guides out there telling architects what to do and what to avoid: see the sections here in the Trafford Design Guide and in the Essex Design Guide for some pictures and renderings. I’d say a critical feature is that they always come with some other use for the building - the shared garage space is always under something.
I want to tag some amenity=parking and amenity=parking_entrance features that have parking like this, and according to osmwiki:Key:parking, there’s no real tag value for it.
Not parking=multi-storey, because that requires 2 or more levels with parking spaces, according to the wiki page.
Not parking=rooftop either, since it’s not on a roof.
Not parking=underground, since it’s at street access level.
It’s not parking=surface in my eyes: it’s inside a building, not a surface-only feature that’s open to the elements
If it’s parking=garage, it needs to say more. Just covered=yes or some other combination?
Seems like it’s a term in its own right, at least in British English. It’s always qualified as “undercroft parking” in use, btw.
What to use? Shall I just go for parking=undercroft and document that? Or does there need to be a tag for single-storey parking enclosed within a building structure at any level relative to the street (perhaps up a ramp, but not below ground since that’d be a parking=underground). What’s the general feeling here?
TI shows 65 uses of parking=off_street_covered , which may work? Most of those though, are in Christchurch, NZ, where it appears that someone has used it for normal residential garages?
You could possibly achieve the same thing just by adding extra tags:
parking=surface + covered=yes + level=0 (& also layer=0?)
I’m from Canada and am not familiar with the term “undercroft”, but broadly speaking this is what I’ve done in the past for similar situations:
For instance, I’d mapped this parking lot:
… with parking=surface,
quite deliberately extended the parking lot way under the parts of the building that overhang the parking,
mapped the building with building:part=*s,
added building:levels=* and building:min_level=1 tags to illustrate that the ‘occupiable’ parts of the building start on the second level above grade (i.e. what we in North America call “the second floor”, or what most others call “the first floor”), and
added a parking aisle way with covered=yes tag ‘under’ the occupiable floors of the building
I’m not sure this situation is totally analogous though. This is a case where the “ground floor” of the building consists of vestibules, an elevator lobby and doors to/from (exit) stairwells, and most of the rest of the “ground floor” is otherwise unenclosed parking.
If your question pertains specifically to buildings where the parking is entirely enclosed with an overhead door, like so:
(located here; the rest of the building above grade is a typical home)
I would simply add a node for the door and tag it like so:
As such I’m of the opinion that adding a separate parking=undercroft is unnecessary. Given it seems to be a fairly specific ‘regionalism’, I don’t think it’s desirable either.
The limitation of =undercroft would be it only applies to those under proper buildings, with usable rooms above. Then a question is, does it need to be different from those with a plain roof, eg including the “deck” parking (as an extension of buildings) term you linked to from Trafford? And how to handle that mixed undercroft-and-deck (part under roof, part under buildings) parking?
For reference, there are 2.9k parking=surface with covered= that’s not covered=no . Eg =rooftop + covered=yes might be used for those on roof, but has an extra cover (although that would need =roof debated, depending on whether it’s a proper upper roof, or an extra canopy). Need to think carefully about what parking= is for to be clean and organized, avoid mixing different (orthogonal) aspects.
To me that would imply that there will be a maxheight even if not explicitly tagged and that there will probably be less manoeuvrability than =surface because there’ll be some structure to support whatever’s above it.
This example is under a hospital building, and adjoins a separate surface car park. Public signage nearby refers to it as an “undercroft car park”. Inside, there are lots of car bays, and some bike parking. Several floors of hospital building above it are supported by columns, and the entrances for foot, bike, and car are extremely wide, for ventilation.
A second example from the same hospital, under a different but connected building. The hospital site is sloping, so this entrance is one level above the first example in the whole connected structure of the hospital. Inside, there is parking for disabled motorists to use, and a “cycle hub” space with some locker storage, pumps, tools, and plenty of bicycle parking. Again, the building is supported by columns inside the undercroft space. This one has no adjoining surface car park outside.
This one lies under a rooftop terrace garden between two 4 and 5 storey apartment towers, but the 1st floor garden is part of the same apartment complex. You can see through to the ventilation holes on the opposite side. The entrance is has an automatic gate, and bays inside are individually numbered for the apartments. There are columns inside too.
These photos are all my own work, and I will keep the originals for a few months in case anyone needs them.
So, if people don’t like the term “undercroft”, then how about “parking=single-storey”, to contrast with parking=multi-storey?
I can’t say I agree with calling it “surface” parking, since that implies a space open to the sky. These clearly have buildings on top of them! I mentally can’t file them into the same category as “surface parking”, and I don’t think that’s surprising in English. The “surface” term has an understood legal definition which doesn’t involve buildings on top:
Surface Parking means parking spaces that are not covered by a building and are not enclosed by walls. Surface parking is also known as a “parking lot”.
I’m not sure how I feel about parking=single-storey if there are levels of other stuff above. I don’t know if my suggestion was really any better though.
Then again I’m never really sure how to feel about the building:levels tag on normal multi-storeys, it’s usually only the stairwell/lift that keeps the ‘rooftop’ part of the parking within the normal level count.
I have also faced the problem in the past that there is no appropriate documented value for this kind of parking. During a large, detailed parking area survey a few years ago, I “invented” my own value for this and used parking=level. However, almost all of these have since been changed back to other values such as parking=surface, which I think is inappropriate.
In my opinion, we have a gap here that would be worth closing with a proposal. However, I would rather leave the choice of value to native English speakers
parking=indoor sounds to me too much like the same statement as indoor=yes, and thus not distinguishable e.g. from parking=multi-storey or underground, which are also “indoor” Then it would be - at least in the sense of the term - a superset that includes e.g. multi-storey and underground parking. Furthermore, there are also “single-storey” parking areas that are only partly below or inside a building (and partly outside the building), so that “indoor” would not be semantically correct in such cases, although in my opinion it is the same type of parking.
As far as I can see, there have been these suggestions so far:
parking=undercroft
parking=off_street_covered
parking=covered
parking=indoor
parking=single-storey
parking=level
Are there any others or have I missed any? What are these parking facilities called in everyday life? Parking deck? Parking level? Parking floor?
Fair enough, I agree. It doesn’t really cover a few of the salient features of an undercroft car park, which always has a particular relationship to surrounding features
It doesn’t particularly imply that there’s other stuff on top
It misses that undercroft parking typically connects to the road network directly at street level, without much of a ramp
Sort-of overlap with parking=rooftop, since that’s normally a single storey
Sort-of overlap with parking=underground, since that’s normally on a single level (are underground levels a “storey” though? I guess they are for sloping sites that attract undercrofts or semi-open vaulted spaces of any name… but then are they still “underground”? Splitting hairs here)
It’s not terrible, it’s just that there often aren’t any doors on the public ones
Also it’s not really particular to this type of space: as Supaplex030 pointed out, other classes of parking are “indoors” in the sense of being inside a building with dedicated parking areas.
Some pics of the older sort of “undercroft”, from where the name for the modern parking arrangement comes. Whether cathedral-builders intended to build them for storage or not, people eventually started using vaulted, columned spaces like these for storage, markets, shops and other secular activities. After all, they’re open on one side and protected from the rain. And that’s how you get “undercroft”: they’re used for storing cars
Compare it with what happens pretty often to viaduct archways over time, I guess. Sometimes they’re parking, sometimes they get bricked in at one end and turned into shelters or warehouses.
The croft part doesn’t really have a coordinate term in modern German, as far as I can make out. Krypta and Gruft took parallel routes from Latin and Greek, seemingly. Both mean what’s called a crypt in English (vaulted spaces, usually enclosed, for burial and maybe chapels, not for storage of items), and no-one seems to be making *Untergruft out of it. Modern Dutch has krocht, but that has unpleasant overtones in addition to having the common meaning of chapel or burial space.
The English “undercroft car park” term is well known enough that whatever we choose should document it as search keywords.
I guess my intent here is to fill the gap between multi-storey (those have too many levels), underground (that isn’t accessed at street level), surface (surface parking can’t be in a building), garage(s) (they’re purposely built, and don’t imply things on top) and so on. But I think there are still some gaps in the model
Document parking=undercroft to mean the narrow definition of a single storey of multi-storey-like parking accessed at ground level. It would be a special case of parking=single-storey.
Document parking=single-storey to mean the same general idea, but allowing levels 1+, to fill that gap
parking=underground stays the same, and excludes the -storey types.
Maybe document parking=off_street_covered to mean the thing in the photo below, or possibly some types of dense Japanese city parking (places where on-street parking is banned (good move, if you ask me))
Putting the parking node or outline inside a building outline, or making a building_part=parking could help cover the “and it’s inside a building” aspect, come to think of it. That works for parking=single-storey, but somebody should probably explain what
I think this bit of parking is more of an “off-street covered” arrangement than a big “undercroft”, but it is probably still a “single-storey” Any more edge cases (pun intended)?
I guess they might broadly fall under “garage”, but in a way that we don’t normally consider a =garage in OSM as we don’t tend to (micro)map ones on the ground floor of multi-story houses and when we do map garages separately they’re normally the typical residential one or two car ones, not the ones with marked spaces. I think I have heard of people talking about parking garages similar to this for a large building, but they may well have been referring to =underground.
Ten days in I think we’re probably at the any-tags-you-like it and stick it in the wiki stage. If you stuff the page with synonyms and link back here on the talk page we’ll at least have documentation when the inevitable synonyms come out of the woodwork in a couple years time.
