@ke9tv: Very well said!

It is not correct to assume that because NYS labels something (as an administrative boundary/entry) a village corresponds to what OSM calls village. Tags mean what they are defined to me, as if they are uppercase defines in a C header file. In particular, they do not change meanings as one moves to different jurisdictions with different legal definitions of the terms.

In MA, there is more or less no definition of village. A ‘town’ is merely a municipality (level8) with a particular form of government. Some of them feel like osm-cities. Some MA-cities feel like osm-towns. Some MA-towns feel like OSM-hamlet because if you blink you won’t notice them.

So my advice is stop expecting the OSM tags to match the local words. The point of OSM is to have a consistent semantic representation, not to encode local words.

The key definitional aspect, which I think is the reason for ~all disagreement, is that there are two more or less unrelated concepts.

One is units of government and administrative boundaries.

The second is what human geographers call “populated places” which is (perhaps was long ago) about clusters of dwellings, totally independent of administrative boundaries. This is what the village/town/city is about.

Now, we blur these. In the US, we blur them partly because almost always, admin boundaries were established to align with the places. And, because there has been so much development that in between village centers there is just a sea of houses, rather than farmland or forest. So talking about where a place ends is really dificult.

I would say the path forward is in being clear about tagging for admin boundaries, and not insisting on using any particular state’s label for the kind of entity. In MA level=8 is either a city or a town, and every bit of MA is in exactly one such entity. They are the same thing, but cities have city councils and usually mayors, and a town has a town meeting and a Board of Selectmen (often renamed SelectBoard around me, but I’m in MA). Trying to put this in tags doesn’t really make sense because the next state has different rules and you really want tags to make sense for data consumers without state-specific lookup tables. I know NY is more complicated.

What we should be doing about place names is less clear. There are village centers with names, separate from admin boundaries, and people know those names. They belong on the map. But the idea that they have populations is very difficult because they are nodes, not polygons, and really should not be polygons.

The big point is that names for places as points and admin boundaries are really separate.

Are you aware of any support for storing epoch in a node in the OSM database?

How would you say a node’s coordinates in OSM should be interpreted, lacking epoch?

I used to transform to ITRF2014 (EPSG:7912) as a proxy for recent WGS84. That amounts to the same as your procedure, I think.

You might have tried to transform to the ensemble, and if so I am 99% sure you would have gotten a null transform.

Also, I thought that OSM had population cutoffs for these terms, and I’d rather see an exception than a tweaked threshold. If you look at the one you want to promote, is the underlying reality that the number of people who consider that they sort of live there, even if outside some admin polygon, is higher?

Also, city and town are relative. In sparse regions, a place with a hospital and airport is a big deal as you say. That level of people. adjacent to a big city, is not worthy of promotion.

I have long thought that place=foo and admin boundaries are not definitely related even though in most cases they match. The first is the hierarchy of “settlements” which one can determine by ignoring government and seeing where people live, and the second is government. Granted, typically governments are organized around where people live, so in New England there are town centers and town boundaries. But there are also secondary villages within towns, that historically where somewhat separate culturally.

So when putting place= and associating population, is that the population of some admin thing, or does one essentially tile with place= and count population in each polygon?

And then there is quarter/neighborhood as place, which are meant to be sub-parts of city, vs town/village/hamlet which aren’t. So in Acton, MA, it is a town (I think, <50K) in osm-speak, and there is South Acton and West Acton which are not separate by government but which have old town centers. In counting their population, is it removed from Acton’s? I think this situation needs a sub-part of town vs village, as in the modern world admin and locality are messily intertwined.

Also there is place=locality for places that have names but it’s not about people living there, but that can be avoided.

One concept that may be useful from USGS topo maps is the “house omission tint”, which (at 1:25K scale) is about noting to the reader that there are so many houses (small buildings) that they are not shown. I wonder if building omission should be something more adaptive, so that one isolated house is drawn but many are shown as a tint. This is probably hard but I wanted to point you to it.

In general I prefer as much detail as is feasible in terms of buildings, but omitting buildings that fall below some number of pixels seems reasonable. In osmand I find that buildings are omitted too aggressively, but I tend to look at less urban areas.

For rail, I have liked the crosshatch-on-lines style used by USGS. Clearly at lower zoom only the through lines should be shown, but in general I only favor omitting things which cause objectionable clutter.

The thing I’d like to see you tackle is showing unpaved on residential/unclassified and up. Certainly I have driven on roads that I would consider tertiary that are not paved. I realize this is contentious (but don’t really understand why).