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PapaMap — methods & honesty

Wickeltische, die Väter erreichen. All figures below are the 26 Jul 2026 snapshot; the stats strip on the map is recomputed nightly and may differ.

What this map is — and is not

PapaMap shows places in Hamburg that OpenStreetMap records as having a baby changing table (changing_table=yes or limited), colored by whether a dad can actually reach the table. It reads OSM, and only OSM. It writes nothing anywhere — fixing the data happens on OSM itself, through the links on each pin.

It is not a toilet-provision scorecard, and it does not rank cities. The section below explains why that stronger claim cannot honestly be made from open data.

What the colors mean (the exact rule)

Only objects tagged changing_table=yes or changing_table=limited appear on the map (changing_table=no is counted in the stats only). The color comes from changing_table:location: the value is split on ;, each part trimmed and lowercased, and matched as an exact token — never by substring, because female_toilet contains the string male.

• Green — accessible: any token is one of male_toilet, unisex_toilet, dedicated_room, room, wheelchair_toilet, sales_area. A dad can reach the table.
• Red — women's room only: otherwise, if any token is female_toilet. The table exists, but it is in a room a dad normally cannot enter.
• Grey — unknown: everything else — no location tag at all, or only unrecognized/free-text values. Nobody has recorded which room the table is in. Grey is the call to action.

How to fix a grey pin

Grey means one missing answer: where is the changing table? Anyone with a free OpenStreetMap account can supply it, on site, in under a minute:

• MapComplete (any phone, in the browser): every grey pin's “Answer on MapComplete” link opens the same object in MapComplete's toilets theme. Log in with your OSM account (MapComplete handles the login), and answer its changing-table questions — including which room the table is in. Your answer is saved straight to OpenStreetMap and shows up here after the next nightly rebuild.
• StreetComplete (Android): has a dedicated changing-table quest, but it is disabled by default. Enable it under Settings → Quest selection & priority, search for “changing table” and tick the quest. It asks yes/no at toilets, cafés, restaurants and similar places — great for growing coverage; for the which-room answer on an existing grey pin, use MapComplete.

Edits are made under your own OSM account and belong to the commons — they outlive this site and benefit every other app reading OpenStreetMap.

Why a provision scorecard is impossible from OSM

The obvious bigger project — an open male:female toilet-provision ratio per city, the number the “potty parity” argument actually turns on — cannot be computed from OpenStreetMap. We checked before building. An empirical spike across eight metro cores (Berlin, London, Paris, New York, Tokyo 23 wards, Amsterdam, Vienna, Melbourne; 26 Jul 2026) found:

• Only 29.9% of mapped toilets carry any gender tag at all, and just 8.5% are tagged both male and female.
• The gender tags that do exist (male/female/unisex) are presence booleans, never counts. Zero gendered capacity or cubicle-count tags were found in any of the eight cities. The one capacity key, toilets:num_chambers (~27k uses), is ungendered and a stale 2014/2017 import; its gendered variants toilets:num_chambers:female / :male have 2 uses each worldwide.
• In Hamburg specifically (same-day Overpass check — Hamburg was not one of the eight spike cities): 443 mapped toilets, none carrying a toilets:num_chambers* capacity tag; two carry only the bare, ungendered capacity tag. OSM shifts daily — the stats strip on the front page recomputes the toilet and capacity-tag counts nightly.
• Tagging rates are a mapper-community artifact, not a provision signal — single-occupancy toilets are correctly left ungendered, and communities tag at wildly different rates. A cross-city ranking would grade OSM contributors, not cities' toilet equity.

So the honest statement is: toilet provision itself is unmeasurable from open data today. This site measures what is measurable — where changing tables are recorded, and which room they are in — and turns the gaps into contributions.

The one computable fact: where the tables are

changing_table:location is, as far as we know, the only open vocabulary on Earth recording which room a changing table is in. It is sparse — about 3,659 of ~77,000 changing_table objects globally, under 5% — but where it exists, it is lopsided (taginfo, 26 Jul 2026):

• Tables recorded in the women's room only: ~485.
• Tables recorded in the men's room only: ~71 — roughly a 7:1 skew. ~289 more are tagged in both rooms; ~410 in total record any men's-room table, worldwide.

Caveats, stated plainly: the sample is small and tag-biased (mappers choose what to record), so the exact ratio should not be over-read. The direction, though, is consistent with what is already documented elsewhere: changing infrastructure defaults to women's spaces, which locks dads out and quietly assumes childcare is women's work. This map exists to make the missing data visible — and easy to fix.

Data licence & attribution

All map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). The GeoJSON and stats files this site serves are derived from OSM and are therefore also ODbL. Global tag statistics come from taginfo. The site's own code is MIT-licensed.

Privacy

This is a static site. No accounts, no cookies, no analytics, no tracking scripts; the site stores nothing about you and has no server-side database. The map page loads its background tiles from OpenStreetMap's tile servers, so those requests are subject to the OSMF privacy policy. If you follow a link to MapComplete, StreetComplete or openstreetmap.org, you are on their sites, editing under your own OSM account — nothing passes through us. Formal pages: Impressum · Datenschutzerklärung (German).

Sources: live Overpass spike over 8 metro cores (9,674 toilets) and taginfo key statistics, both 26 Jul 2026; Hamburg counts from the same nightly Overpass query that builds this map. Domain note: papamap.de is a placeholder and may change.