I found myself down a rabbit hole searching for a good tool for a specific use-case today. The use case is trying to send someone a link to a specific geographic area. My use-case was for directing another person to a specific meetup spot (“meet me over here by the northeast corner of the parking lot”), which doesn’t need to be a point but could be something like a 10x10 foot square and still get the point across. Additionally, there’s a use-case for it in leaving “map notes” within the OSM system: some notes need to indicate very precisely “there’s a missing feature RIGHT HERE”, but others could be more general (“this area is a forest”), and if the note could be tied to a zone, that could be more helpful.

I have used what3words in the past for this, and that site has a nice, short URI scheme to share with people, but the map layers don’t include OSM options, so I started looking for ways to combine the two. That lead me to the wiki page that highlighted many shortcomings with that system (as it’s a centralized, copywritten service). So I went hunting for other systems that could fill the same need of sending people a nice link to “meet me here” (small area) or “I live here” (building-sized area), with OSM tile data under it.

Of the many options for “geohash”-style approximations of latitude/longitude, it seems “Plus Codes” (formerly “Open Location Codes”, OLC) have gained traction as a way to refer to small and large geographic areas, but the main https://plus.codes/map site (the key one that allows seeing a visualization of the grid system, so you know how big a region you’re referring to) only uses Google Maps tiles as the underlying visual, so aesthetically is the same as what3words (telling someone “meet me at the corner of the parking lot here:” with https://plus.codes/86MG4JJJ+HHR is essentially the same experience as giving them https://w3w.co/handy.lame.treats).

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I’ve found the parking lot signs aren’t that useful on the University of Wisconsin campus, if you’re not familiar with the various lots. Some lots require a permit, and some are metered parking. If you’re permit-less and looking for somewhere to park, the signs at the entryway to each lot are not that useful from a distance. Each has a red band at the top with white lettering indicating either “PERMIT REQUIRED” or “METERS ENFORCED” above the common “Monday-Friday, 7am-4:30pm”. From a distance, since both are red bands, and two words long, it’s hard to distinguish at a glance, before turning into the lot itself.

The UW parking map (http://transportation.wisc.edu/files/14_15ParkingMap.jpg) isn’t much more helpful, only differentiating the permit-vs.-meter lots with a “M” symbol on the metered lots.

So, I started tagging the parking lots in OpenStreetMap with the proper “access” tags, and hopefully some parking app can parse them and make an easier parking experience while on-campus.

The permit-required lots are:

access=private access:conditional=public @ Mo-Fr 00:00-07:00,16:30-24:00; Sa-Su 00:00-24:00

And the metered lots are:

access=public fee=yes @ Mo-Fr 07:00-16:30

In exploring my own neighborhood, I made the discovery that in addition the named playgrounds that appear on most maps (including Google Maps), there’s a few small playgrounds, situated in the open voids between houses backyards. I found these and mapped them after taking my girls to go play there:

osm.org/#map=18/43.01846/-89.50666

From the aerial photographs, it looks like there’s more in the neighborhood, so now I’ll have to go exploring!