Fire Hydrant Colors (`emergency=fire_hydrant` + `colour`)

[Tex2002ans]

In some countries, the color of fire hydrants can tell important information (flow rate being the biggest).

For example, in much of the US, the OSM Wiki on emergency=fire_hydrant says this coloring system may apply:

• Light blue = more than 1500 US gal/min
• Green = between 1500 and 1000 US gal/min
• Yellow = between 1000 and 500 US gal/min
• Red = less than 500 US gal/min

According to emergency=fire_hydrant on taginfo, there are:

• ~2 million emergency=fire_hydrant.
  • ~840k fire_hydrant:type=pillar
• ~156k have a colour.

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General

Affected tag(s) to be modified/added:

• emergency=fire_hydrant + colour
  • 1st most important.

and these 2 lower-priority optional quests too (see Notes below):

• bonnet:colour
  • 2nd most important.
  • bonnet:colour (~16.6k usages) so far.
• cap:colour
  • By far, the least least important.
  • cap:colour (~14.6k usages) so far.

Question asked: "What is the color of this fire hydrant?

Checklist

Checklist for quest suggestions (see guidelines):

• [x] 🚧 To be added tag is established and has a useful purpose
• [x] 🤔 Any answer the user can give must have an equivalent tagging (Quest should not reappear to other users when solved by one)
• [x] 🐿️ Easily answerable by any pedestrian from the outside but a survey is necessary
• [x] 💤 Not an overwhelming percentage of quests have the same answer (No spam)
• [x] 🕓 Applies to a reasonable number of map data (Worth the effort)

Ideas for implementation

Element selection: This quest can be asked on:

• Any emergency=fire_hydrant that DOES NOT have a colour on it.
  • Probably limited to fire_hydrant:type=pillar only.
  • (Don't see how it would be applicable to underground ones.)

Metadata needed: N/A.

Proposed UI: The UI could have:

• (Optional) A photo or 2 of pillar fire hydrants
  • Maybe 1 fully red + 1 fully yellow?
• A simple 3x2 or 3x3 grid of color squares.
  • With the most popular 7 colors first.
    • (See list below.)
  • You select color square, and checkmark appears.

Notes:

• Main colour should probably be limited to 1 color only.
• Should be lower priority quests, popping up only after the type + location gets answered.

Most Popular Fire Hydrant Colors

According to taginfo...

Ranking most->least popular, the fire hydrant colours are:

• ~81.0k red
• ~39.6k yellow
• ~7.8k orange
• ~3.9k gray
• ~3.9k blue
• ~2.6k green
• ~2.3k silver
• ~1.9k colour=#ff0000
  • Which is red.
• (There are no other colours listed.)

Personally, since I began mapping, I have seen mixes of:

• Yellow
• Red
• Yellow or Red (with Green top/caps)
• Silver (with Light Blue top/caps)

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Optional Quests

These pillar-type hydrants tend to have 3 main parts:

• bonnet = the "top hat"
• pillar = the main body
• coupling / caps = the things they hook the hoses to.

While most hydrants are 100% painted the same color, sometimes the bonnet's color is used to represent the flow rate (or what size pipes it's connected to) instead!

Bonnet Color

For example, here is photos of a:

• red hydrant with a green bonnet
• yellow hydrant with a green bonnet

Note: No idea how much spam this quest might cause though (and how to deal with making quest not pop up or create "redundant data" on the "100% painted-same-color" ones...)

This might also cut down on people who might be confused and press "Uh..." on main Hydrant Color quest, because they might think Yellow/Green or Silver/Blue is "multi-colored", and they should only be limited to 1 for that quest type.

Note 2: Instead of being limited to the 7 popular colors above... these may have extra colors like black or white.

Cap Color

If bonnet color gets added, then likely the person would also want to answer this one.

For example, here is a...

• red hydrant with white bonnet/caps
• blue hydrant with white bonnet and red caps

I'm not too sure how popular they are in the real-world... but:

• This "cap color" quest might be a little more complicated + need multi-color selection (at least 2).
  • Personally, I have seen a handful of hydrants with mixed color caps (3 or 4 caps painted 2 different colors).
  • The VAST majority of these answers will probably only need 1 color though.

With multi-color caps... OSM so far lists:

• 967 = yellow;black
• 5 = red;silver

But, for the most part, I see:

• Everything matching.
• OR only bonnet different color.
• OR bonnets + caps being painted in same colors.

I suspect that's how the VAST majority of real-life hydrants are.

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Side Note: Looks like there can be a huge mix of "non-standard" colors too:

• Colossal: "‘The Hydrant Directory’ Catalogs the Color Palettes of Community-Painted Infrastructure" by Grace Ebert (June 3, 2024)

(But so far, I don't see any proof of those crazy colors making its way into OSM... yet...)

So...:

• The 7 most popular colors ONLY would probably be fine.
• For bonnets/caps, perhaps the 7 most popular up top.
  • With extra grid of squares with your basic HTML colors
    • Like "black" / "white" / "light blue".
  • Maybe those can also put the fire hydrant's colour square in the very first position?
    • So a colour=red hydrant would auto-insert red square in 1st slot for a bonnet/caps quest.
    • Maybe make that "more prominent" with a 1x1 square on its own row, then others listed below?

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Use-Case: The hydrants in my area are mostly just 100% yellow or 100% red. Would be nice to be able to quickly add that info while on-the-ground (and answering the other 2 fire hydrant quests) though. As of now, I've been adding the color in iD when I get back home.