private parking leads to misunderstatings

woodpeck commented 5 months ago

One of the most frequent "private property" complaints that reach the DWG is about parking: "People are parking on my private property and when confronted they claim the map indicates a car park!"

Frequently the car park will be correctly mapped as access=private or access=customers, but neither property owners nor drivers seem to mind.

I suggest that we:

either drop the rendering of private car parking altogether (because those authorized to use it will know, and those not authorized don't have to know)
or label it with "(private)" wherever it doesn't have a name
or change the icon from a simple "P" to something with a little padlock
or anything else that makes it clearer than at present that you can't just park your car there.

Expected behavior

The expected behaviour is that the map does not mislead users into believing there was a public car park when there isn't.

Actual behavior

The actual behaviour is that many users - land owners as well as car operators - misleadingly believe our faint blue "P" was indicating public access. If this happens to a few dumb people then it is something we can ignore, but if it happens every day then there is a problem with the map.

Screenshots with links illustrating the problem

sample screenshot

(Sample screenshot - without a contrasting public "P" in the vicinity, there's nothing to suggest that this was not public parking.)

imagico commented 5 months ago

Yes, the current design of indicating access restricted POIs of various types with a lighter color symbol is a conveniently simple but not very intuitive approach to rendering.

either drop the rendering of private car parking altogether (because those authorized to use it will know, and those not authorized don't have to know)

I don't think this is a good idea in this categorical form. There are huge private parking lots (like of factories for their workers) that would not be good to just hide from the map. I would regard the 'P' not only as a you can park here indicator but likewise as a cars are parked here sign. And the latter equally applies to public and private parkings.

or label it with "(private)" wherever it doesn't have a name

Does not work on a global multilingual map because (private) is English language. Even if we'd spatially differentiate the style and use translations in all the languages of the world it would still be much better to have a language independent visualization.

or change the icon from a simple "P" to something with a little padlock

That is an idea worth exploring but we would need to combine it with a more differentiated visualization of the different access values (like we already discussed in #4717 and #4890). Showing all access values we currently render with a lighter color ('private', 'no', 'customers', 'permit', 'delivery') with a padlock would be misleading. But doing so for access=private (593k uses on amenity=parking) while leaving access=customers (482k uses) with the plain 'P' symbol would work - and provides a practically meaningful differentiation for the map user as well.

It would also be worth going through the other POI types we render with a lighter symbol with access restrictions if they could benefit from a similar differentiation.

ZLima12 commented 4 months ago

I don't think dropping the rendering entirely is ideal, since parking lots can be considerably large and constitute a meaningful landuse.

gravitystorm / openstreetmap-carto