Create New Amenity

I am new to OSM. I added a feature to a building using the brand feature for U-haul. When I finished it I saw that it uses the amenity car_rental.

U-haul is a truck rental and moving equipment company so that amenity does not accurately describe it. I posted in github to correct it to truck_rental but they said that truck_rental does not exist and that a new amenity has to be proposed in the OSM project.

https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index/issues/2968

How do I get the amenity truck_rental added?

Where has Q7862902 (on https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index/issues/2968 ) come from? It sounds like it’s a bug in whatever editor that you are using if that’s forcing you to use an incorrect tag for something or preventing you from using a correct one. However, it does look like (from https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index/issues/2968#issuecomment-522250579 ) the main author of that editor is suggesting to use “shop=rental” instead for U-Haul locations. I’m not a customer of theirs so can’t comment on whether that’s better or worse - if you’re happy that that’s OK then just go with that in the future.

Generally speaking, you can use any tags you like in OSM (though of course it makes sense to use one tag and not two when describing exactly the same thing). You can search for where “rental” has been used as a value by looking at:

https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=rental#values

and you can see that there is some usage (though not much) of “truck_rental”:

https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/amenity=truck_rental

If you think that that’s a better tag you’re free to use it, and if the OSM editor that you’re currently using doesn’t let you log a bug with it and use a different editor.

It looks like they will use shop=rental for now.

It is possible that truck_rental would be a better way to tag, possibly when combined with one or more additional tags. Most of this discussion would take place on 2 places: the #tagging list on the OSM US Slack https://osmus-slack.herokuapp.com/ , or the Email tagging list https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging . The process for tag approval is a bit mysterious, and it helps if there is some number of tag uses already in OSM data.

The thing that caused me to notice the car_rental tag was an image of a car and a key on the node point. I was able to add the tag truck_rental but then the node point became blank. Now with the shop=rental the image is of a shopping container which seems better than a car and a key for u-haul. Some how the image on the node point is connected to the brand name.

When various tags are added what are the functions? Are the tags primarily for search?

The tags are mostly used to help classify objects, often to narrow the list of types of items to show. For example, to show all nearby eating establishments to a user, the tag type ‘restaurant’ and ‘fast_food’ could be searched.