Lamp mount

[dokutan]

General

Affected tag(s) to be modified/added: lamp_mount Question asked: How is this street lamp mounted?

This quest was suggested before in #1667, but not implemented because it was deemed to be not useful enough. However since 2019 when that issue was opened, the lamp_mount tag (and mapping of street lamps) has become significantly more common, and i see at least some use for this tag. Therefore i wanted to ask if there is a chance of adding this quest to StreetComplete given the changed circumstances before suggesting this quest for SCEE instead.

Checklist

Checklist for quest suggestions (see guidelines):

• [x] 🚧 To be added tag is established and has a useful purpose
  • Lamps mounted on poles are sometimes used to attach posters/signs or as a place to lock bicycles, but certainly shouldn't be tagged for these purposes, making the lamp_mount tag potentially useful in these cases (especially in places that mostly use suspended lamps).
  • Mapping suspended lamps is interesting because they could be an obstacle
• [x] 🤔 Any answer the user can give must have an equivalent tagging (Quest should not reappear to other users when solved by one)
• [x] 🐿️ Easily answerable by any pedestrian from the outside but a survey is necessary
• [x] 💤 Not an overwhelming percentage of quests have the same answer (No spam)
• [x] 🕓 Applies to a reasonable number of map data (Worth the effort)
  • as of 2024-05 ~4 million street lamps are mapped, of those ~750 000 (i.e. ~18.5%) have the lamp_mount tag: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/highway=street_lamp#combinations
  • Adding street lamps is easy using the Things overlay, it would make sense to immediately add information about newly added lamps

Ideas for implementation

Element selection: All highway=street_lamp without lamp_mount and without support. (Edit: i think support should be treated like lamp_mount)

Metadata needed: None, this quest should be the same in all countries.

Proposed UI: See #1667

[matkoniecz]

This quest was suggested before in https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/1667, but not implemented because it was deemed to be not useful enough. However since 2019 when that issue was opened, the lamp_mount tag (and mapping of street lamps) has become significantly more common, and i see at least some use for this tag.

which new uses appeared since then?

Lamps mounted on poles are sometimes used to attach posters/signs or as a place to lock bicycles, but certainly shouldn't be tagged for these purposes, making the lamp_mount tag potentially useful in these cases (especially in places that mostly use suspended lamps).

I do not get how this is supposed to be useful. For start, typical lamp cannot be used with proper bicycle lock (U-lock) as they tend to be too wide.

And even if lamp may be used as such backup, why mapping them would be useful for cyclists? If there are no bicycle parkings then you would look around, not use app to look for backup attachments.

[dokutan]

which new uses appeared since then?

I'm sorry for causing confusion, i did not mean that entirely new use cases for this tag appeared, but rather that no uses were mentioned in the original issue.

I do not get how this is supposed to be useful. For start, typical lamp cannot be used with proper bicycle lock (U-lock) as they tend to be too wide.

I agree that looking for street lamps with a map as a backup to lock a bicycle is uncommon (but not impossible), even though parking bicycles at street lamps seems to be common in some places.

Of the uses i mentioned originally, looking for places to attach advertisements or decorations seems to be the more important one, as a map of suitable lamps is definitely helpful in these cases. From looking at the issues for the power pole material (#187) and power line attachment quests (#4825), which appear to be even less useful for most people, another potential user is the operator of the lamps.

Ultimately i do not know exactly why the lamp_mount tag has become so popular since ~2019, but that alone suggests to me that some use cases and users exist.

I would try to implement this quest if it gets accepted, otherwise i would open an issue at SCEE.

[westnordost]

Ultimately i do not know exactly why the lamp_mount tag has become so popular since ~2019, but that alone suggests to me that some use cases and users exist.

Probably due to its inclusion in iD presets as a field. iD shows all fields to the user, so users are somewhat urged to fill all the boxes.

Regarding the quest guidelines:

• 🚧 I also do not see this fulfilled. Sure, some bicycle locks are wide enough to be able to lock a bike to a lamp post, but there are many other possible places one could lock one's bike to (that are also more frequent), like traffic signs, certain kinds of bollards, fences, other (obviously unused/scrap) bikes, chairs, signs, ... well. So I agree with @matkoniecz that noone would actually consult a theoretical smartphone app that theoretically could search for things to lock your bike to. Instead, you would just look around.

  Furthermore, I consider this tag somewhat unnecessary as well, because whether it is a street lamp with a post, mounted on a wall or suspended on a wire, can mostly be derived from the lamp node's location. Also, the presence of the values lamp_mount=bent_mast, lamp_mount=angled_mast, lamp_mount=straight_mast seems to mix how the lamp is mounted with it's appearance. The wiki page also doesn't mention why recording any of this information in particular would be meaningful.

• 💤 The quest would likely be quite spammy for areas where street lamps are mapped comprehensively. Usually, the way lamps are mounted does not differ in one area and will likely be 99% the same in one area

[matkoniecz]

Probably due to its inclusion in iD presets as a field. iD shows all fields to the user, so users are somewhat urged to fill all the boxes.

Actually some fields can be and are hidden by default and shown only when some data is filled already. Maybe it can be requested at https://github.com/openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema to do it with this one.