I am new to these forums so I hope I’m doing this the right way. My question regards the mapping of indoor toilets which are not public toilets.
I’m a student at the VUB in Brussels. There are a lot of toilets on the campus, technically meant for students and staff but due to the university’s “open campus” policy they are de facto accessible to everyone. In my opinion this doesn’t imply mapping as accessible to all (e.g. access=yes), as they are intended to be used by students/professors/staff/… only, and this can be enforced (this was for example the case during the COVID pandemic in 2020, where buildings were partially locked).
Currently close to none of these toilets have been mapped, and I noticed the OSM wiki describes the use case for amenity=toilets as “a toilet open to the public”, which is de facto the case here, yet as far as I know access describes the legal/theoretical access, not actual in case these differ. However I think it would be very useful to be able to map these toilets, for a few reasons. (1) Given the lack of public toilets, if the toilets at VUB were mapped, even with non-public access and a note regarding the “open campus” policy of VUB, this is useful for people who need to use a toilet. (2) There are at least 15,000 students at VUB and while I am aware mapping private areas is not OSM’s goal, I do think at least tags like toilets=* on buildings can be useful. Not all toilets are equal which in my opinion makes it extremely useful, if not necessary, to map them individually. Notably, some are wheelchair accessible while others are not, and some are gender neutral while others are not. With some buildings at VUB being up to 10 floors high, I think this would be quite difficult to map.
So, to conclude, should this type of toilets be mapped, and if so, in what way?
9 posts - 5 participants
Ce sujet de discussion accompagne la publication sur https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/mapping-of-indoor-toilets/104148