I came across that on the one hand terms are often singular: i.e. vehicle (incl. almost all subtypes) - but sometimes plural (see suffix tags to capacity:xxx.
For recreational trailer we have both in parallel:
I propose to keep caravan as key (caravan=no/yes/… and as value (shop=caravan) and to phase out caravans. Substantial parts of the wiki page for caravans shall be moved to wiki page caravan but leave a remark that caravans shall not be actively used furthermore.
caravans= currently has 53,000 uses and is used by a number of data consumers (see caravans | Keys | OpenStreetMap Taginfo). It is an established tag in use since the early 2010s. This is compared to just 2,900 uses of caravan=. This proposal would have a large impact and require a lot of software, renderers and even mappers to adjust to it. With that in mind, what problem does this proposal solve?
Also caravans= often occurs on the same objects as tents=, static_caravans=, and cabins=. Changing one of these in isolation seems likely to create more rather than less confusion.
Not really. Recreational “containers” (caravans, mobilehomes, tents) are the only ones where we distinguish like this. For every other type of vehicle the tags are identical.
As alan said, if we change one, we should change of all of them at once.
Restrictions on streets always use the singular caravan, restrictions on camping grounds always use the plural caravans. What about parking lots? Should they inherit the tag from streets, or from other area POIs?
I wouldn’t treat this as any evidence - actual restrictions for caravans on streets are rather rare while it is more or less enforced to be added to every camping-related POI.
I personally think it’s not worth the effort to change, but on the other hand, while the usage count is high, the plural tags are only used in the context of camping grounds, so the number of affected data users is rather small.
from taginfo: 99% of the values assigned to both keys are yes/no/designated. In case you would have asked the community yesterday: What is the different meaning/use of the keys “caravans” and “caravan”? a most likely answer could have been - Huh, what?
I don’t have any idea which data consumers distinguish between both, but would be keen on learn that.
Do you know that, or do you just fear that? “caravan=” is valid for routing in order to check: is it allowed to use a specific way/area towing a caravan? Since caravan shall be used furtheron, there is no impact.
“caravans=” is used to indicate whether a camper trailer is welcome and accepted to stay at a camp ground. Which software (renderer) analyzes this and will ignore using caravan instead of caravans?
I could not check for 100%, but did not found any other key, in particular for vehicle(s), where the specific meaning depends on singular or plural.
Taginfo has links to projects for caravan and caravans - at first glance it looks like what you’d expect, although where a project appears in both lists you’ll need to have a look at the source code or just ask the project.
I do create various sorts of maps from OSM, but handling camp site details has been in the “too hard” pile for me for some time, so I don’t have a dog in this particular fight.
However, generally I can say that having two different keys for the same (or similar) concept in OSM is far less of a problem than having one key meaning different things in different contexts (like e.g. service).
If you can identify an actual problem - perhaps the meaning of a key/value combination is ill-defined - then people would think it was a problem worth solving. If not, it isn’t…
travel trailers also known as caravans.