Outdoor seating has become more important than ever in times of pandemic - but I noticed recently that places that people can sit and drink a coffee or read a book on a bench or at a table are not mapped in my neighborhood in Seattle. Lots of restaurants have co-opted sidewalks and even parking spaces (this would have been very controversial a year ago!) for use by their customers, but I’m more interested in street seating that can be used by anyone.

Everything I’ve mapped so far falls under the category of “Parklet” - it’s a permitted structure usually built by, but not exclusively for, nearby businesses. There are some charming ones around town, see pics here and here!

I noticed today there is a tag https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure=parklet, used infrequently and almost exclusively in San Francisco. Instead I’ve been using https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure=outdoor_seating in combination with access=yes, as this seems to capture identical information, albeit without reference to the parklet movement. So far I’ve only found one of the places digitized as something else - the parklet outside Cortona Cafe is tagged https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure=park. This is misleading, it’s a seating area between the sidewalk and the asphalt. Here it is on the website of a local political candidate

So far I’ve been capturing these as points, mostly out of laziness, but I should go back and digitize the tiny polygons, or if there is a polygon, remove tags like leisure=park. I’m undecided as to whether I should tag them as both leisure=parklet AND leisure=outdoor_seating at that point?

I’m also not naming these parklets, as most are referred to either with the name of the sponsoring cafe, or the nearby intersection, and I don’t know that need this info, except maybe for Nominatum?

Please feel free to weigh in on this endeavor :-).