thetapeworm wrote:Does this have any impact on the guidelines around lay-bys?

There is no change to the mapping of lay-bys.
They should have no area place, and are the only roads that are allowed to be named '[P]'.

^ You could map this as a single rectangular area covering both sides, or you could try putting a point place in the middle. See what works best.

Generally, I think it's preferable to mark (other) on-street parking as points, as they tend to be too small to appear on the map anyway.

Note: the next* version of the app will automatically show car parks when approaching the destination.
So, it's critical that we only show genuine car parks. Areas and Points work equally well.

(*you didn't hear it from me, nudge nudge wink wink)

Here are the top 80 cities with unnamed car parks:

197 Bedford	41 Llanelli	29 Northwich	22 Lichfield
86 Sheffield	41 Stockton-on-Tees	28 Salford	22 Merthyr Tydfil
78 Coventry	41 Glasgow	28 Reading	22 East Kilbride
68 Newport	41 Southend On Sea	28 Gloucester	22 Haywards Heath
58 Cannock	40 Leicester	27 Farnborough	21 Manchester
58 Newcastle upon Tyne	40 Belfast	27 Rudheath	21 Tamworth
54 Poole	40 Burnley	26 Bracknell	21 Stafford
53 Swansea	40 Coatbridge	25 Exeter	21 Ayr
50 Ipswich	39 Basingstoke	25 Bristol	20 Rotherham
49 St. Leonards-on-Sea	36 Northampton	25 Walsall	20 Ashington
48 Southampton	36 Loughborough	25 Preston	20 Lancaster
48 Edinburgh	35 St Austell	24 Chesterfield	20 Cardiff
48 Haslemere	35 Bournemouth	24 Shrewsbury	20 Cheltenham
48 Dundee	34 Peterborough	24 Scunthorpe	20 Macclesfield
45 Gateshead	33 Bolton	24 Weymouth	19 Bradford
44 Plymouth	33 Crewe	24 Aberdeen	19 Stockport
44 Kempston	32 Darlington	23 Barnsley	19 Sleaford
43 Portsmouth	30 Birmingham	23 Sevenoaks	18 Barnstaple
43 Middlesbrough	30 Aylesbury	23 Ashford (Kent)	18 Swindon
42 Dorchester	29 Blackpool	23 Wishaw	18 Harlow

Just sayin'

biccies wrote:When is that data from? Is it pulled from the live map or editor? I only ask because I went through Stafford and deleted a bucket load of car parks recently.

Data is taken from the editor, and could be out-of-date by a few days. I checked Stafford, and there are still 21 unnamed (or [P]) car parks there. As NorfolkMustard says, editing of Places has been really unreliable lately, and some just don't want to be deleted.

Moley_uk wrote:I'm wondering what to do about train station car parks as a fair number are mapped. They are public access and although they are intended for rail users there is no reason why you can't just buy a parking ticket and then do what you like.

On the one hand, I'd say that these should not be mapped, as no one would want to go to a destination in-town and end up paying station ticket prices...

Moley_uk wrote:I'm not sure that a tick in "customer parking" is appropriate for stations as you'd probably want the navigation point to be the drop off area and sometimes the car parks are quite some distance away.

...but this point is quite valid, and suggests that the app should be able to display two results: one for the station itself; and a second one for the long stay, or whatever.

York has a dedicated "Commuter Car Park", which is situated near the railway station but is not 'station parking' per se. You wouldn't expect to go there when shopping, but it also needs to be listed as a search result for anyone who is specifically looking for it.

Ideally the app will allow the user to review the nearby parking locations and be able to identify the right ones for their purpose. Ergo, they should have proper names, addresses and (if possible) descriptions. As long as there are only a few car parks like this which stretch the rules, then they will continue to be useful to users.

What would be really nice if car parks (points) could be associated with a specific destination, so that when driving to a station or airport you'd see all the relevant parking services only for that destination, and you wouldn't see them when navigating somewhere else. #dreamon

tl;dr let's keep station car parks mapped for now

Further thoughts (with input from iainhouse): To help disambiguate specialist car parks in the search results, several tricks can be employed when filling in the details of the Place:

1. Concise place name, e.g. "Long Stay Parking" (fits on the user's screen)
2. Alt name matches the destination, e.g. "St Pancras International" (so it features in search results)
3. Street name matches the destination, e.g. "St Pancras International" (adds context to result)
4. Description has additional information to help user choose correct destination

This is just theoretical at the moment, so we're doing some tests...

leocylau wrote:I'm still a bit struggling to map car parks for big shopping centre such as Metrocentre in Gateshead, Telford Shopping Centre or a smaller example York Designer Outlet. They have many car parks in different zone such as Yellow, Red, Grey, Blue car park etc. I feel they should be mapped separately with name, Yellow car park, etc.

Do they need to be mapped at all? Is there any reason why a user would want a navigate to a particular one? If they are driving to a particular business within the shopping centre, then the PLR segments should navigate them to the closest parking.

I do know that there's a Park and Ride situated within the York Designer Outlet, so I would expect to see only that part of it mapped.

PealRinger wrote:Should we be using "Long Stay Parking" or similar as the place name?
Most car parks have a proper name so I've been using that and then putting "Long/Short Stay" in the description where relevant along with type of parking ("Pay and Display", "Pay on Foot") and information about charging hours.

What you're doing is exactly right.

My example above is for places that don't have proper names, e.g. Stansted Airport Long Stay Parking, which is just a bit too long and repetitive.

I've started a separate thread to track progress of this clean up: Map Raid: Car Parks!.

Questions and comments can continue to be posted here. Thanks.