I am not sure how it is in USA but in my country golf courses are abuse of public resources for (almost) private use. For a very few who can lobby enough for renewal of these leases and these are kept out of reach of the normal public, either by rule or by cost, sometimes both. Golf courses are lungs of many of the growing cities, across the world, but I do believe they should not be kept exclusive. Also, this comes directly from feudal/colonial times here. Those also require too much of other natural and public resources to be maintained.
In the USA they are overwhelmingly public and are desperate for customers.
The handful of private ones near me are also desperate for new members, and several country clubs have ended up closing. Considering some of the golf courses that have closed around me ended up being converted into Amazon distribution facilities, I am not terribly excited about the idea of more golf courses closing.
In the USA as elsewhere golf courses are incredible wastes of water and false green spaces that would function better as green spaces were they actually parks open to the public they serve the wealthy. What is different is that in the US there is very little real (operational) worry about waste of water (or other resources) - at least compared to other places - and there is lots of space compared to other places.
That is an overly broad generalisation. Where I live, golf courses aren’t irrigated at all - they just rely on rainwater, like every other farm does.
One of the golf courses near me has tee times for $10. I do not consider that something that only “serves the wealthy”. They also periodically close the course and open it up for RC plane enthusiasts.
Another one you can easily go for a walk in - I often do. It is effectively a public space.
I love golfing in England and Scotland! But in Germany it's hopeless, it's treated like exclusive tennis courts.
Australia has nice golfing experiences also. But in the USA I never found affordable golfing.
Bothers the snot out of me that I'm told by my irrigation water company that I have to cut back and have a brown yard, meanwhile I drive past perfectly lush green golf courses, with sprinklers dumping more water in 1 hour than I use all season
The vast majority of the world is nothing like this
From Scotland to Tasmania, most courses congregate around already wet and mostly sand/loamy soil (largely unusable for other purposes without major construction)
I agree with you for artificial American places like TPC Scottsdale or Wolf Creek GC etc
I’m an avid golfer and I live in Scotland. I’m not going to pretend that they’re bastions of sustainability - it’s not rained here in 2 full weeks and my course is watering their greens and fairways. We’re not quite at drought but the UK has a hosepipe ban in place and yet courses are continuing to water and maintain.
On the suitability of the soil, for some courses yeah. For the vast majority - there’s 4 courses within 20 minutes of me in an urban area and they would be developed into property in a heartbeat if they sold. My home course has an apartment block cutting through it.
I don’t think any of that matters though - it’s not like it would be a public park if it wasn’t a golf course. It’s certainly no less resource intensive than the massive concrete jungle of a sports centre with a running track across from me, or a football stadium or any of the numbers of empty buildings in the city centre. It’s an amenity, just like any other, it has a cost and we have to accept that otherwise we might as well just tear it all down.
Where I live the municipal courses are actually a part of our water retention and drainage systems that are provided at cost (or discounted cost, sometimes free) to members of the community.
Basically we found a good way to create green spaces for recreation out of flood plains and drainage ditches. During heavy rain they provide important buffers that protect the nearby homes from flooding, and reduce the urban heat sink effect.
That's not true everywhere but keep it in mind before making sweeping statements about golf courses. Some people like golf. It's fine if you don't.
yes and new developments/ cities are doing a much better job balancing this in most cases. Golf courses are a great use for flood plains and overflow regions.
That’s odd, since golf courses aren’t farms. The ones local to me are not taxed at ag rates but are taxed at the commercial rate which is the highest rate.
Amazon’s new data centre, of course, is paying a tiny fraction of that since they negotiated paying less.
I live in New Hampshire where our taxes are entirely property tax based. Anything over ten acres qualifies as farm land no matter what. It’s a quality scam.
Were those private lands/properties? Because in my country a lot (if I can't say 'most') are actually on public land with weird and disgustingly cheap leases which can be closed at a finger snap but somehow very few Govts have tried it because every Govt have ministers (and of course bureaucrats) who are members there or made members there, and then there are their kids and families etc. So no they can't be turned into building constructions really, I mean assuming the limits of corruption in my country. Because technically anything can be sold if we go down that way. Also, my city is reclaiming lakes, demolishing illegal constructions and parks are also being reclaimed and cleaned up etc.
Not perfect, far from it, but it's a start and no, that Amazon Warehouse thing I am not expecting to see here. People are divided strongly on religious and ideological lines here but everyone's tempers run high whenever Govt tries touching a public land, green patch, and now we just take matters into our hands whenever that happens.
In my city (Kraków, Poland) there was attempted to waste enormous amount of public land and turn it into private golf course, funded from public money. It seems it was stopped after protests from citizens.
In some parts of the US it is certainly the case that golf courses are private and as a citizen you notice there are v. Few parks but lots of good courses. Many of the courses pay little in taxes so they’re also feels that there is a disparity between how the rest of society functions and golf courses.
Los Angeles is a v. Good example - huge urban sprawl - poor urban planning - few green spaces - amazing golf courses - as a runner I personally noticed I would be running around golf courses and not have any parks near me
Malcolm is not much more than a pop physicologist who is a very good writer. It looks like he is going to get his way with that golf course in LA that has some sort of vote happinging soon. Here is what will happen.. "the public interest" will win, and for a while it will be a park of some sort, then there will be a slow but inexorable push by the city council to reduce the size of the park by selling the land to developers. 15 years down the road it will be luxury homes for the ultra wealthy and nobody will be recreating there.
Yeah, I could imagine golf being a sore spot for Indians. I never imagined India would even be a hotspot for golf, but given the amount of corruption going on, it would make sense that golf courses would be foisted upon the public. It’s always discouraging to see the amount of upper class Indians who, despite colonial times being long gone, are still very willing to sell out their countrymen to appease whites or to fit a British/white ideal.
I hope I’m wrong about this impression, and I’m just seeing cherry picked news articles, but your reaction makes me think otherwise….
In Toronto, I think golf courses are built on flood plains along rivers (Don, Humber, etc.). Some other flood plains are public parks. Houses are generally not built on flood plains.
Because it doesn’t matter in certain cases and the needy may just click on the profile and kinda figure out if they are so inclined. Or someone can ask and they can reply.
So, I started https://golfcourse.wiki in 2020, and I see courses that basically only I’ve mapped.
It’s cool, I want it to be public, if you want to work together, do reach out.
I would also say what you are doing is almost certainly opening you up to liability if you are just scraping other sites and republishing their data. One paper town that you published and you might have a lawsuit on your hands.
Nice! Someone shared thAT wiki with me recently on reddit. I had not been aware of it before. Great stuff!
I'm not a lawyer but my stack is clean. My base layer is OSM, which is licensed for exactly this stuff (and attributed). On top of that I used golfcourseapi.com which i also recommend (affordable, and fairly reliable so far, but not always current). Then community notes etc.
I cross reference against other sources but I am only publishing facts, which are not copyrightable in the US.
Would love to touch base one day and compare notes. I work in the golf industry so mostly just made this for myself. But after sharing with some friends and co workers i thought the wider golf community might appreciate it
Sounds good, and it would make sense that OSM and I have some crossover at this point. Now that I've had more time, I can see that the extremely obscure courses are not in your dataset (Like Ulukhaktok GC: https://golfcourse.wiki/course/ulukhaktok_golf_course-ulukha...). Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of time to look through your site when I saw this post, so I’m sorry about that.
Just so we're clear, I'm effectively fine with sharing my data via Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses (say, CC BY-NC 4.0). Much of my site depends on fair use and not being for profit anyway. I'm actively losing money on the site every month (ha!).
---
One personal note...
It looks like you're not using referral advertising by linking to Golf Now. I would say -- golf nut to golf nut -- as someone who cares about small, mom-and-pop golf courses, Golf Now can be incredibly bad for those courses. I understand that might just be Pollyanna-ish given "the internet," but I've talked to folks who operate small courses who feel forced give a big portion of their margin to those middlemen (even losing money sometimes). I actively avoided linking to them. My partner works in hospitality, and it's the same for sites like booking.com (if you can book through the business's website, your probably should).
I'm entirely happy to collaborate on this, I really just care about someone mapping all the golf courses even if it's not me. I'm happy to collaborate even if we're trying to build different things. Feel free to reach to me here, on GolfCourse.Wiki, or via the blog (for some reason most people contact me through the blog): https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/
I'd like to to the same with my data (allow a download of all the course pages) eventually. I'm only publishing facts at the moment but would love to support other features (local ratings, reviews, etc)
its pretty easy, you already have the urls for all the sites. Non-uniformity might make it difficult. I am also working on a mapping project but instead of all the vacation rental listings available on direct booking sites provided by PMSs to eliminate Airbnb fees
Yes, obviously, they have monopsony power because networks are natural monopolies. The problem is that they can extract rents because of that monopsony power... and they do.
Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network, that network has the ability to extract rents from the sellers. It should be trivially illegal to operate such a site in the US, given anti-trust laws, but we've decide in the last 40 years that we don't enforce anti-trust in the US anymore, so here we are.
The fact that sites like booking.com can charge hotels a commission of up to 25% per booking shows exactly the level of extractive power that a site this type of power, simply because they were the first to capture the monopolistic network. It doesn't matter that some of the smaller hotels and course will go out of business, even if customer as a whole are hurt, because the total market is more valuable to them by maximally extracting rents.
> Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network
I just don't see Golfnow as a "single network". I golf with a lot of people that have never heard of them. If a course isn't on Golfnow and I want to golf there, I still book with them however they want me to even though it's not as convenient.
Just like Booking.com has competition from Google, Google also makes it easy to find and link directly to any golf course to book.
I'm not saying you're wrong about some courses not liking them but I have a hard time understanding why it's so hard for courses to just not deal with Golfnow and take bookings another way if they think it's so harmful.
With respect, I don’t think you understand what you’re talking about.
They are far and away the leading tee time advertiser. The golf courses are the “customers” I’m worried about. They are operated by the parent company of the Golf Channel. Comcast was their long term owner until they got spun off.
There isn’t really many companies in the golf space that can compete with that. I don’t want to have to explain things like the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index. My point is that ultimately, these companies are natural monopolies, and should be regulated like utilities because of that.
> With respect, I don’t think you understand what you’re talking about.
Probably not. I'm just telling you my observation.
And you're pointing out a problem without offering a solution. Your advice to OP is "don't link to Golfnow". So I suppose they should do what you do and just link to the course homepage... which links to Golfnow? What does that accomplish?
In any case, the golfnow.com is not what most people use to find courses. OP even said they are building their search app because "Google filters for golf course results are terrible". Not because golfnow.com searches are terrible. Golfnow is for booking, for which there are other alternatives that courses can use.
This is the misunderstanding. Golfnow is for advertising. The people booking tee times are not the customer, the course advertising their tee times on Golfnow are the real customers of Golfnow.
My concern is that market for tee time advertising is effectively completely controlled by one company. That should be concerning.
Nice job! When I zoom in on Google earth you can easily see if it’s actually a golf course or not, would been interesting to use this to draw up the areas with polygons and some more details.
Then you could start providing a lot more details about each one automatically.
yeah i am pulling from OSM. I can probably draw those polygons. It;s been an OK source for number of holes etc but I need to cross reference to get other detailed info
This is supercool. But I have a tangential question. I see projects like this built on top of OSM for different use cases. Does this data gets contributed back to OSM. A lot of them seems hobby projects, so it's hard to maintain long term, but the data is quite useful and could be used beyond the lifetime of these projects if they can be contributed back to OSM somehow.
OSM probably has the best data on golf courses because for many courses, people have mapped each 'golf=hole' as a way, and mapped other golf course features such as 'golf=bunker', 'golf=green', etc.
OSM knows of almost 40k golf courses around the world.[2] This compares to 38k golf courses known to the R&A Golf Around the World Fourth Edition (2021) report and 37.6k courses listed in the NGF course database as of July 2024. It's likely OSM knows of 99.99..% of all active golf courses and also still retains tags for closed/unused golf courses too. So if OSM were to be inaccurate, it'd likely be inaccurate for whether a golf course is open or closed, rather than OSM not knowing about a golf course existing.
I wonder whether an OSM tile server / custom style sheet for golfers would be easiest and most useful/comprehensive way to keep track of golf courses?
Golf is a sport I never tried but really want to. Also from the outside it looks both fun and relaxing to be outside in the nature. But I’m in the wrong country for that currently lol, golf is a niche here in Eastern Europe
It definitely can be enjoyed, but does it beat a walk in the forest? Not necessarily.
Golf is a social marker in Anglo-Saxon countries. Only the highest classes used to be able to afford it. In America they built a lot of courses because they have the space, and there was demand, obviously because lower classes wanted to feel like they’ve made it. Kind of like wearing tuxedos (or owning a Mercedes Benz in Eastern Europe).
Obviously the higher classes just got more exclusive markers (particular clubs, private jets, islands, etc.), but America is left with all that land converted into courses which apparently aren’t even used that much nowadays. Turns out it can get boring quickly.
Do you plan to contribute the data back into OSM? That would be the nice way to go to share with the community and allow you to have better data in the future with less maintenance work.
This is fascinating not because I’m interested in visiting any of these. But to see the communities in Alaska with courses, or to look at the most concentrated places and wonder what so many people in Florida get out of having a fairway and one hole right in their backyard..
In a lot of places, that golf course is the most beautiful piece of land around you, not just well maintained but lot of wildlife, birds, deer etc. so having that right on your backyard whether you golf or do not golf is a great attraction
Yep, old people in Florida love to golf and really love it when they can drive their golf cart from their garage straight to the clubhouse, finish a round of golf, and ride it right back to their garage only ever having to get out to hit the ball.
Love this - I've tried finding courses through google maps and left wanting more. Would be great to have prices (or even a price "average") this is often a big deciding factor for me.
Golf courses in USA use half a trillion gallons of fresh water annually.
All data centers use less than 0.2 (of which only less than 0.02 is used for cooling the servers, the rest is just electricity generation, which can and should be replaced with solar).
There's no replacement for water usage for golf courses and even half a trillion number is after recent 30% reduction of usage from what it was before.
As I recall, OSM already tends to have many golf courses mapped in extreme detail, because there’s a game that lets you play OSM golf courses on your golf simulator.
This sometimes leads to conflict between the game’s passionate users and OSM, when they map every road around a golf course as a cart path, because that’s the only thing the game imports.
It turns out people have even mapped individual greens, fairways, bunkers, etc on OpenStreetMap! So you can use that data to generate a yardage book for each course: https://npilk.github.io/openyardage-web/
Possible bug: Went scrolling way East on the map for kicks and was surprised to find 14 courses on Guam, but also that the data don't repopulate as you make it back around the globe a second time. This seems to happen in both directions—eg Guam doesn't populate at all if you scroll West.
Fixed and deployed! Markers only existed on the primary copy of the world, if you ever scrolled passed it would have nuked all the pins. Thanks for the report!
I noticed the site is actually quite slow to load on first visit (at least for me). Is it actually loading in all the courses up front?
If so, a better experience would be a landing page where users can search or specify a geographic location - only loading in what is relevant for the query.
You have hidden greens in Solon springs Wisconsin but you have it on the wrong side of the lake. It's like a 25-minute drive around the lake to get to it.
I think you must only have the village name for the address and not the street address. You can see the golf course in the map image on the other side of the lake.
definitely better filled through the site itself! any submissions get queued and reviewed overnight. Then elevated to human review if it's hard to verify automatically.
That seems slightly pointless no? I mean Singapore is small enough already, there probably is 10 courses maximum. The one I've seen is the Changi course, and I don't think it can compare to the average course size in the States
I am surprised that Google Maps has never mounted a camera on a golf cart and driven it over golf course holes. They have a backpack version and they've used it on ski resorts.
Somehow it disturbs me that we have access to a far-away, tropical island and use the very limited space there for not just one, but eight golf courses
Yes. You can report any missing or bad info right in the course info drawer that pops up when selecting one. There is a button for sending corrections with a few fields but you can also just make a comment.
you can fill out missing info right on the site. There is a buttons for missing/ correcting data and you can fill out any info. Appreciate any that do!
The amount of water used is somewhat less important than what the source of the water is.
And it's important to understand that "using water" isn't like "using coal". In other words, while coal can be burned once, water is in a cycle that means water can be "used" infinitly.
But back to the source. A golf course near me takes effluent water (ie treated sewerage) destined for pumping out to sea. They spread it over a large piece of land. What is not consumed by plants, or evaporation, ends up in an underground aquifer.
So it "uses" a lot of water. But it's not using tap water.
Obviously this is not true for all courses. Hence the issue of "source", not "quantity" is material.
For sure, I posed the question as it is often asked about data centers. Nuance is important, as is accurate data.
The relative comparison is a potent one as we have a national debate about how we use our resources effectively and responsibly. I've seen similar mappings for data centers and thought OP's project might be a good starting point. The golf world is also aware about this issue and looking at ways to be more balanced with nature. I've seen some articles within the golf world discussing their water usage from before the data center debate began, which was very nice to see.
"The amount of water used is somewhat less important than what the source of the water is."
Where I live, the golf courses are the largest and often only consumers of recycled water — in a water stressed city. This directly subsidises indigent water use.
It doesn't stop the easily-offended from agitating to convert them into low-cost housing.
“easily-offended / agitating”? Hmm. There’s lots of good reasons to convert golf courses to low-cost housing, or use the recycled water for something else. Expand irrigation of parks, recharge groundwater, create wetlands, create dual plumbing networks to use the recycled water for toilet flushing etc.
There will of course always be different potential uses for land. And there are up and down sides to every argument.
It's easy though to dismiss options which don't benefit me personally. If I don't cycle then money spent on cycle tracks is wasted. If I don't golf then I'll lean towards non-golf options.
Incidentally it's very seldom local users who are lobbying for more local low-cost housing. That typically reduces neighborhood property values.
Equally having green spaces is something that drives up property values etc.
And yes, creative use of effluent would be nice. We should be able to recycle grey water into toilets etc. But that is an infrastructure change, so not easy to implement.
Yes we need public green spaces. And yes we need sports fields and golf courses and so on. It's not necessarily an either/or situation.
That said if its in the US and incorrect or incomplete you can submit, but anything outside the US i'd wait until i do a first pass on the new regions.
Well, golf fields are not as bad for environment as datac... I mean mines and factories.
Really, golf courses are taxed much lower usually, as they go as green open spaces (similar to protected forest areas), and also their assessed land value does not account for neighboring residential prices, so their tax is based on lower value than land can be sold at.
Golf courses are often full of exclusively native foliage, often protected areas, and wetland areas. With much more ecodiversity support than neighboring businesses, residential areas, and even parks.
The courses around me cost like $25-50 for a group tee time reservation. It's pretty cheap to get a set of second hand clubs, my small collection was had for like $75 over the years. You don't have to be rich to play golf.
Plus the golf courses around me are often municipal, they've got some nice bike paths to cut through the urban landscape around and through the links. It's a much nicer ride than along busy streets.
That said I do tend to enjoy disc golf more than traditional golf. I have never had too good of a shot.
I'm not especially fast and it normally takes me about two hours to play 9 holes. I also sometimes go to practice at the driving range or putting greens if I don't have that much time but want to do some golf things. It's not like one needs to do a full 18 holes every time you go golf.
How long do people normally spend at a public pool? How long will people spend playing basketball or tennis or baseball? How long is a soccer game usually? About a couple of hours?
probably and old site that now redirects.. you can report issues right on the site. community reports are going to be the most reliable for me over time.
I am not sure how it is in USA but in my country golf courses are abuse of public resources for (almost) private use. For a very few who can lobby enough for renewal of these leases and these are kept out of reach of the normal public, either by rule or by cost, sometimes both. Golf courses are lungs of many of the growing cities, across the world, but I do believe they should not be kept exclusive. Also, this comes directly from feudal/colonial times here. Those also require too much of other natural and public resources to be maintained.
In the USA they are overwhelmingly public and are desperate for customers.
The handful of private ones near me are also desperate for new members, and several country clubs have ended up closing. Considering some of the golf courses that have closed around me ended up being converted into Amazon distribution facilities, I am not terribly excited about the idea of more golf courses closing.
In the USA as elsewhere golf courses are incredible wastes of water and false green spaces that would function better as green spaces were they actually parks open to the public they serve the wealthy. What is different is that in the US there is very little real (operational) worry about waste of water (or other resources) - at least compared to other places - and there is lots of space compared to other places.
That is an overly broad generalisation. Where I live, golf courses aren’t irrigated at all - they just rely on rainwater, like every other farm does.
One of the golf courses near me has tee times for $10. I do not consider that something that only “serves the wealthy”. They also periodically close the course and open it up for RC plane enthusiasts.
Another one you can easily go for a walk in - I often do. It is effectively a public space.
The spot you live in might be an outlier. Golf courses in US use half a trillion gallons of fresh water annually.
>Golf in Saudi Arabia: Best Courses from Riyadh to the Red Sea
https://houseofsaud.com/travel/saudi-golf-courses/
>Avoid: June–September — temperatures regularly exceed 45°C (113°F), making outdoor play dangerous
I love golfing in England and Scotland! But in Germany it's hopeless, it's treated like exclusive tennis courts. Australia has nice golfing experiences also. But in the USA I never found affordable golfing.
Irrigation isn’t the only concern but also the loads of herbicides and pesticides that get dumped on them.
… which also happens if the land were people’s lawns, were farmland, or commercial space with lawns.
Yes, that’s also a problem too.
Bothers the snot out of me that I'm told by my irrigation water company that I have to cut back and have a brown yard, meanwhile I drive past perfectly lush green golf courses, with sprinklers dumping more water in 1 hour than I use all season
In wealthy parts of the US, maybe
The vast majority of the world is nothing like this
From Scotland to Tasmania, most courses congregate around already wet and mostly sand/loamy soil (largely unusable for other purposes without major construction)
I agree with you for artificial American places like TPC Scottsdale or Wolf Creek GC etc
I’m an avid golfer and I live in Scotland. I’m not going to pretend that they’re bastions of sustainability - it’s not rained here in 2 full weeks and my course is watering their greens and fairways. We’re not quite at drought but the UK has a hosepipe ban in place and yet courses are continuing to water and maintain.
On the suitability of the soil, for some courses yeah. For the vast majority - there’s 4 courses within 20 minutes of me in an urban area and they would be developed into property in a heartbeat if they sold. My home course has an apartment block cutting through it.
I don’t think any of that matters though - it’s not like it would be a public park if it wasn’t a golf course. It’s certainly no less resource intensive than the massive concrete jungle of a sports centre with a running track across from me, or a football stadium or any of the numbers of empty buildings in the city centre. It’s an amenity, just like any other, it has a cost and we have to accept that otherwise we might as well just tear it all down.
Let's give a "Hip Hip, Hooray" to your links courses and the Champion Golfer of the Year. What a putt!
I find it absolutely insane that there’s a golf course in Death Valley
Visualizing it on satellite view puts things into perspective. Here's Wolf Creek:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ccFwBoDZMrmK7Bvc6?g_st=ac
Just surrounded by dust.
There are like 3 in St. George Utah, meanwhile nearby lake Powell is nearly empty
Where I live the municipal courses are actually a part of our water retention and drainage systems that are provided at cost (or discounted cost, sometimes free) to members of the community.
Basically we found a good way to create green spaces for recreation out of flood plains and drainage ditches. During heavy rain they provide important buffers that protect the nearby homes from flooding, and reduce the urban heat sink effect.
That's not true everywhere but keep it in mind before making sweeping statements about golf courses. Some people like golf. It's fine if you don't.
yes and new developments/ cities are doing a much better job balancing this in most cases. Golf courses are a great use for flood plains and overflow regions.
Don’t forget the tax breaks! Some places (many?) use farm rates for the tax rate.
That’s odd, since golf courses aren’t farms. The ones local to me are not taxed at ag rates but are taxed at the commercial rate which is the highest rate.
Amazon’s new data centre, of course, is paying a tiny fraction of that since they negotiated paying less.
I live in New Hampshire where our taxes are entirely property tax based. Anything over ten acres qualifies as farm land no matter what. It’s a quality scam.
Were those private lands/properties? Because in my country a lot (if I can't say 'most') are actually on public land with weird and disgustingly cheap leases which can be closed at a finger snap but somehow very few Govts have tried it because every Govt have ministers (and of course bureaucrats) who are members there or made members there, and then there are their kids and families etc. So no they can't be turned into building constructions really, I mean assuming the limits of corruption in my country. Because technically anything can be sold if we go down that way. Also, my city is reclaiming lakes, demolishing illegal constructions and parks are also being reclaimed and cleaned up etc.
Not perfect, far from it, but it's a start and no, that Amazon Warehouse thing I am not expecting to see here. People are divided strongly on religious and ideological lines here but everyone's tempers run high whenever Govt tries touching a public land, green patch, and now we just take matters into our hands whenever that happens.
It’s private land.
There are a handful of government owned golf courses (sort of like parks that have tennis courts), but they are not common.
> Were those private lands/properties?
In my city (Kraków, Poland) there was attempted to waste enormous amount of public land and turn it into private golf course, funded from public money. It seems it was stopped after protests from citizens.
Malcolm Gladwell did a great podcast on golf courses in prime urban spaces
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/a-good-w...
In some parts of the US it is certainly the case that golf courses are private and as a citizen you notice there are v. Few parks but lots of good courses. Many of the courses pay little in taxes so they’re also feels that there is a disparity between how the rest of society functions and golf courses.
Los Angeles is a v. Good example - huge urban sprawl - poor urban planning - few green spaces - amazing golf courses - as a runner I personally noticed I would be running around golf courses and not have any parks near me
Malcolm is not much more than a pop physicologist who is a very good writer. It looks like he is going to get his way with that golf course in LA that has some sort of vote happinging soon. Here is what will happen.. "the public interest" will win, and for a while it will be a park of some sort, then there will be a slow but inexorable push by the city council to reduce the size of the park by selling the land to developers. 15 years down the road it will be luxury homes for the ultra wealthy and nobody will be recreating there.
So vote better. Fight harder. Make sure it stays green and opens to public at reasonable rates (so that all can access) if not free.
US is a mixed bag. Where i am from, Michigan, we have over 600 courses and 87% of them are open to the public.
In the US many golf courses are owned by local governments as part of public parks.
Many new courses in the US are also built on non-developable land like former landfills.
Not trying to defend all courses, but at least in the US it’s not just uniformly bad.
Within 5 miles of my house are 5 golf courses. I believe only 1 is government owned, by the city.
Yeah, I could imagine golf being a sore spot for Indians. I never imagined India would even be a hotspot for golf, but given the amount of corruption going on, it would make sense that golf courses would be foisted upon the public. It’s always discouraging to see the amount of upper class Indians who, despite colonial times being long gone, are still very willing to sell out their countrymen to appease whites or to fit a British/white ideal. I hope I’m wrong about this impression, and I’m just seeing cherry picked news articles, but your reaction makes me think otherwise….
In Toronto, I think golf courses are built on flood plains along rivers (Don, Humber, etc.). Some other flood plains are public parks. Houses are generally not built on flood plains.
this is true in a lot of cases. its land that otherwise isn't great for any kind of development.
Are you saying your country's government, for some reason, spends its money on private golf courses?
Kraków, Poland tried but it was cancelled after protests.
Why don't the "In my country" posters ever name the country
Because it doesn’t matter in certain cases and the needy may just click on the profile and kinda figure out if they are so inclined. Or someone can ask and they can reply.
> Golf courses are lungs of many of the growing cities, across the world
What? Why and how? And why wouldn't leaving a patch of forest there be way more efficient?
So, I started https://golfcourse.wiki in 2020, and I see courses that basically only I’ve mapped.
It’s cool, I want it to be public, if you want to work together, do reach out.
I would also say what you are doing is almost certainly opening you up to liability if you are just scraping other sites and republishing their data. One paper town that you published and you might have a lawsuit on your hands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement
Nice! Someone shared thAT wiki with me recently on reddit. I had not been aware of it before. Great stuff!
I'm not a lawyer but my stack is clean. My base layer is OSM, which is licensed for exactly this stuff (and attributed). On top of that I used golfcourseapi.com which i also recommend (affordable, and fairly reliable so far, but not always current). Then community notes etc.
I cross reference against other sources but I am only publishing facts, which are not copyrightable in the US.
Would love to touch base one day and compare notes. I work in the golf industry so mostly just made this for myself. But after sharing with some friends and co workers i thought the wider golf community might appreciate it
Sounds good, and it would make sense that OSM and I have some crossover at this point. Now that I've had more time, I can see that the extremely obscure courses are not in your dataset (Like Ulukhaktok GC: https://golfcourse.wiki/course/ulukhaktok_golf_course-ulukha...). Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of time to look through your site when I saw this post, so I’m sorry about that.
Just so we're clear, I'm effectively fine with sharing my data via Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses (say, CC BY-NC 4.0). Much of my site depends on fair use and not being for profit anyway. I'm actively losing money on the site every month (ha!).
---
One personal note...
It looks like you're not using referral advertising by linking to Golf Now. I would say -- golf nut to golf nut -- as someone who cares about small, mom-and-pop golf courses, Golf Now can be incredibly bad for those courses. I understand that might just be Pollyanna-ish given "the internet," but I've talked to folks who operate small courses who feel forced give a big portion of their margin to those middlemen (even losing money sometimes). I actively avoided linking to them. My partner works in hospitality, and it's the same for sites like booking.com (if you can book through the business's website, your probably should).
I'm entirely happy to collaborate on this, I really just care about someone mapping all the golf courses even if it's not me. I'm happy to collaborate even if we're trying to build different things. Feel free to reach to me here, on GolfCourse.Wiki, or via the blog (for some reason most people contact me through the blog): https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/
I'd like to to the same with my data (allow a download of all the course pages) eventually. I'm only publishing facts at the moment but would love to support other features (local ratings, reviews, etc)
its pretty easy, you already have the urls for all the sites. Non-uniformity might make it difficult. I am also working on a mapping project but instead of all the vacation rental listings available on direct booking sites provided by PMSs to eliminate Airbnb fees
> Golf Now can be incredibly bad for those courses
Golfnow offers a service that courses must value, otherwise why would they list with them? And golfers get good deals.
It's not clear to me what's so bad about this.
>Golfnow offers a service that courses must value
Yes, obviously, they have monopsony power because networks are natural monopolies. The problem is that they can extract rents because of that monopsony power... and they do.
Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network, that network has the ability to extract rents from the sellers. It should be trivially illegal to operate such a site in the US, given anti-trust laws, but we've decide in the last 40 years that we don't enforce anti-trust in the US anymore, so here we are.
The fact that sites like booking.com can charge hotels a commission of up to 25% per booking shows exactly the level of extractive power that a site this type of power, simply because they were the first to capture the monopolistic network. It doesn't matter that some of the smaller hotels and course will go out of business, even if customer as a whole are hurt, because the total market is more valuable to them by maximally extracting rents.
> Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network
I just don't see Golfnow as a "single network". I golf with a lot of people that have never heard of them. If a course isn't on Golfnow and I want to golf there, I still book with them however they want me to even though it's not as convenient.
Just like Booking.com has competition from Google, Google also makes it easy to find and link directly to any golf course to book.
I'm not saying you're wrong about some courses not liking them but I have a hard time understanding why it's so hard for courses to just not deal with Golfnow and take bookings another way if they think it's so harmful.
Networks are natural monopolies. It’s no more complicated than that.
Obviously it is, because Golfnow is certainly not a monopoly.
There are small golf courses near me that don't use them and that's fine. Please don't shame the ones that do.
With respect, I don’t think you understand what you’re talking about.
They are far and away the leading tee time advertiser. The golf courses are the “customers” I’m worried about. They are operated by the parent company of the Golf Channel. Comcast was their long term owner until they got spun off.
There isn’t really many companies in the golf space that can compete with that. I don’t want to have to explain things like the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index. My point is that ultimately, these companies are natural monopolies, and should be regulated like utilities because of that.
> With respect, I don’t think you understand what you’re talking about.
Probably not. I'm just telling you my observation.
And you're pointing out a problem without offering a solution. Your advice to OP is "don't link to Golfnow". So I suppose they should do what you do and just link to the course homepage... which links to Golfnow? What does that accomplish?
In any case, the golfnow.com is not what most people use to find courses. OP even said they are building their search app because "Google filters for golf course results are terrible". Not because golfnow.com searches are terrible. Golfnow is for booking, for which there are other alternatives that courses can use.
>Golfnow is for booking
This is the misunderstanding. Golfnow is for advertising. The people booking tee times are not the customer, the course advertising their tee times on Golfnow are the real customers of Golfnow.
My concern is that market for tee time advertising is effectively completely controlled by one company. That should be concerning.
> This is the misunderstanding. Golfnow is for advertising.
Yes that is the misunderstanding. Lets agree to disagree.
Sounds good. And yeah ideally i can link to a course's direct booking links but they are often harder to find.
There's already one club I can see on there that doesn't actually exist.
Is a running gag in the area where I grew up, and made it on this list somehow. So that's weird.
Which course?
please report it on the site!
Nice job! When I zoom in on Google earth you can easily see if it’s actually a golf course or not, would been interesting to use this to draw up the areas with polygons and some more details.
Then you could start providing a lot more details about each one automatically.
yeah i am pulling from OSM. I can probably draw those polygons. It;s been an OK source for number of holes etc but I need to cross reference to get other detailed info
I was thinking image analysis from satellite images, but of course start with what’s annotated (OSM)
This would surely be helpful!
This is supercool. But I have a tangential question. I see projects like this built on top of OSM for different use cases. Does this data gets contributed back to OSM. A lot of them seems hobby projects, so it's hard to maintain long term, but the data is quite useful and could be used beyond the lifetime of these projects if they can be contributed back to OSM somehow.
OSM probably has the best data on golf courses because for many courses, people have mapped each 'golf=hole' as a way, and mapped other golf course features such as 'golf=bunker', 'golf=green', etc.
OSM knows of almost 40k golf courses around the world.[2] This compares to 38k golf courses known to the R&A Golf Around the World Fourth Edition (2021) report and 37.6k courses listed in the NGF course database as of July 2024. It's likely OSM knows of 99.99..% of all active golf courses and also still retains tags for closed/unused golf courses too. So if OSM were to be inaccurate, it'd likely be inaccurate for whether a golf course is open or closed, rather than OSM not knowing about a golf course existing.
I wonder whether an OSM tile server / custom style sheet for golfers would be easiest and most useful/comprehensive way to keep track of golf courses?
[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:golf%3Dhole
[2] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/leisure=golf_course#o...
[3] https://assets.randa.org/c42c7bf4-dca7-00ea-4f2e-373223f80f7...
[4] https://thegolfwire.com/worldwide-golf-course-development-re...
There are a lot of incorrect labels in OSM. I'd love to push my data back upstream to OSM one day once i feel like its very complete and accurate.
Golf is a sport I never tried but really want to. Also from the outside it looks both fun and relaxing to be outside in the nature. But I’m in the wrong country for that currently lol, golf is a niche here in Eastern Europe
It definitely can be enjoyed, but does it beat a walk in the forest? Not necessarily.
Golf is a social marker in Anglo-Saxon countries. Only the highest classes used to be able to afford it. In America they built a lot of courses because they have the space, and there was demand, obviously because lower classes wanted to feel like they’ve made it. Kind of like wearing tuxedos (or owning a Mercedes Benz in Eastern Europe).
Obviously the higher classes just got more exclusive markers (particular clubs, private jets, islands, etc.), but America is left with all that land converted into courses which apparently aren’t even used that much nowadays. Turns out it can get boring quickly.
Golf was democratized under Eisenhower. Today, demand is down because interest is cyclical and private courses are expensive.
Demand continues to go up. More golfers today than ever.
https://www.ngf.org/short-game/golfs-growth-era-the-road-to-...
Try VR golf to get started!
Do you plan to contribute the data back into OSM? That would be the nice way to go to share with the community and allow you to have better data in the future with less maintenance work.
Not yet but i'd like to port it back somehow eventually. I've definitely named a lot of their unnamed courses on OSM
I was going to say you were missing this one but I'm not sure if it's still open after the county purchased it.
https://www.pga.com/play/ny/rome/mohawk-glen-golf-course/033...
Now add mini golf courses.
yeah mini golf would be a nice add. I'd like to get all practice facilities and indoor/ sim golf as well eventually.
This is fascinating not because I’m interested in visiting any of these. But to see the communities in Alaska with courses, or to look at the most concentrated places and wonder what so many people in Florida get out of having a fairway and one hole right in their backyard..
In a lot of places, that golf course is the most beautiful piece of land around you, not just well maintained but lot of wildlife, birds, deer etc. so having that right on your backyard whether you golf or do not golf is a great attraction
retirement communities in florida have a lot of these weird mini private courses.
Yep, old people in Florida love to golf and really love it when they can drive their golf cart from their garage straight to the clubhouse, finish a round of golf, and ride it right back to their garage only ever having to get out to hit the ball.
Love this - I've tried finding courses through google maps and left wanting more. Would be great to have prices (or even a price "average") this is often a big deciding factor for me.
Golf courses in USA use half a trillion gallons of fresh water annually.
All data centers use less than 0.2 (of which only less than 0.02 is used for cooling the servers, the rest is just electricity generation, which can and should be replaced with solar).
There's no replacement for water usage for golf courses and even half a trillion number is after recent 30% reduction of usage from what it was before.
Good thing water replaces itself!
This is great. I'm learning about courses I had no idea existed.
Missed one: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Elizabeth+Lyle+Robbie+Stad...
that's the University of Minnesota Les Bolstad golf course
https://www.uofmgolf.com/teetime
Its actually present, but listed as closed (auto toggled off).
the tee time link is dead and google reports as permanently closed. However if its open i'd love to know!
You can report these right in the site and they should get cleaned up in 24-48 hrs or so,
As I recall, OSM already tends to have many golf courses mapped in extreme detail, because there’s a game that lets you play OSM golf courses on your golf simulator.
This sometimes leads to conflict between the game’s passionate users and OSM, when they map every road around a golf course as a cart path, because that’s the only thing the game imports.
course details are not that great on OSM. typically just some polygons labeled 'golf course' and maybe a number of holes
It turns out people have even mapped individual greens, fairways, bunkers, etc on OpenStreetMap! So you can use that data to generate a yardage book for each course: https://npilk.github.io/openyardage-web/
Possible bug: Went scrolling way East on the map for kicks and was surprised to find 14 courses on Guam, but also that the data don't repopulate as you make it back around the globe a second time. This seems to happen in both directions—eg Guam doesn't populate at all if you scroll West.
Fixed and deployed! Markers only existed on the primary copy of the world, if you ever scrolled passed it would have nuked all the pins. Thanks for the report!
looking into it thanks!
I noticed the site is actually quite slow to load on first visit (at least for me). Is it actually loading in all the courses up front?
If so, a better experience would be a landing page where users can search or specify a geographic location - only loading in what is relevant for the query.
You have hidden greens in Solon springs Wisconsin but you have it on the wrong side of the lake. It's like a 25-minute drive around the lake to get to it.
I think you must only have the village name for the address and not the street address. You can see the golf course in the map image on the other side of the lake.
I think the corrections are better filed in the linked web app. ;)
definitely better filled through the site itself! any submissions get queued and reviewed overnight. Then elevated to human review if it's hard to verify automatically.
Polygon areas would be cool to see how big they are. I made this few years ago for Singapore https://observablehq.com/@cheeaun/golf-courses-in-singapore
That seems slightly pointless no? I mean Singapore is small enough already, there probably is 10 courses maximum. The one I've seen is the Changi course, and I don't think it can compare to the average course size in the States
good idea!
This is really cool! Thanks for your work.
great! have you seen https://openskimap.org/ and https://openskistats.org/... maybe change name to open golf map?
Not a bad idea i have not heard of those
Missing this one on Bainbridge Island, outside of Seattle:
https://nwhickoryplayers.org/2015/08/ccs/
Believe it is only open for residents in that area
please report through the site!
Already helped me learn of new courses in my area I didn't know about. THank you and works well
I am surprised that Google Maps has never mounted a camera on a golf cart and driven it over golf course holes. They have a backpack version and they've used it on ski resorts.
Somehow it disturbs me that we have access to a far-away, tropical island and use the very limited space there for not just one, but eight golf courses
why?
Great job! This is very useful.
The search by city, state doesn't seem to work.
If you enter something like "los angeles, ca" it returns no results.
zip code search works fine.
Only state and zip currently. City names not yet supported (its another 3000ish pages)
FYI:
2101 Sneath Ln, San Bruno, CA 94066, United States
https://i.imgur.com/DP6SOtr.jpeg
this is a great resource we can use when we Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest!
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-make-the-g...
This is badass. Thank you!
Near my area, there is a driving range and a simulator place as pins. both nice but not courses. Do you want reports on that?
Yes. You can report any missing or bad info right in the course info drawer that pops up when selecting one. There is a button for sending corrections with a few fields but you can also just make a comment.
No information on Olympic Club. I’m a member. Let me know if you need info for filling the gaps there.
you can fill out missing info right on the site. There is a buttons for missing/ correcting data and you can fill out any info. Appreciate any that do!
Is the Lake course as good as I’ve heard?
It appears Four Sister’s golf course in allegany county md is missing.
A buddy made golf.bronnerapp.com to map golf courses that we had played.
Would be sweet if it also had membership status (private/public/etc)
If you expand the filters, you can see it allows you to select public or private.
it does! pins are different color and it should label them. Might be some inaccuracies, but its pretty close. report any if you see any wrong
fun-fact:
people living next to golf courses have extremely high rates of cancer and Parkinsons
and if a golf course is next to an airport you probably should never ever go there due to the total toxicity
are we able to estimate water usage and other statistics from this data set?
The amount of water used is somewhat less important than what the source of the water is.
And it's important to understand that "using water" isn't like "using coal". In other words, while coal can be burned once, water is in a cycle that means water can be "used" infinitly.
But back to the source. A golf course near me takes effluent water (ie treated sewerage) destined for pumping out to sea. They spread it over a large piece of land. What is not consumed by plants, or evaporation, ends up in an underground aquifer.
So it "uses" a lot of water. But it's not using tap water.
Obviously this is not true for all courses. Hence the issue of "source", not "quantity" is material.
For sure, I posed the question as it is often asked about data centers. Nuance is important, as is accurate data.
The relative comparison is a potent one as we have a national debate about how we use our resources effectively and responsibly. I've seen similar mappings for data centers and thought OP's project might be a good starting point. The golf world is also aware about this issue and looking at ways to be more balanced with nature. I've seen some articles within the golf world discussing their water usage from before the data center debate began, which was very nice to see.
"The amount of water used is somewhat less important than what the source of the water is."
Where I live, the golf courses are the largest and often only consumers of recycled water — in a water stressed city. This directly subsidises indigent water use.
It doesn't stop the easily-offended from agitating to convert them into low-cost housing.
“easily-offended / agitating”? Hmm. There’s lots of good reasons to convert golf courses to low-cost housing, or use the recycled water for something else. Expand irrigation of parks, recharge groundwater, create wetlands, create dual plumbing networks to use the recycled water for toilet flushing etc.
There will of course always be different potential uses for land. And there are up and down sides to every argument.
It's easy though to dismiss options which don't benefit me personally. If I don't cycle then money spent on cycle tracks is wasted. If I don't golf then I'll lean towards non-golf options.
Incidentally it's very seldom local users who are lobbying for more local low-cost housing. That typically reduces neighborhood property values.
Equally having green spaces is something that drives up property values etc.
And yes, creative use of effluent would be nice. We should be able to recycle grey water into toilets etc. But that is an infrastructure change, so not easy to implement.
Yes we need public green spaces. And yes we need sports fields and golf courses and so on. It's not necessarily an either/or situation.
if you want to create custom maps there's https://mapcomplete.org/
Are you planning to do somthing similar other than US?
Yes. After i work out best pipeline in North America id like to expand worldwide.
It will take some time i'm just doing this in spare time.
Are you planning to feed the info back into OSM?
eventually yes. I've named a bunch that were unnamed from OSM
Any plans to expand this to other parts of the world?
Yes. Canada and Mexico next. Then will move to EU Asia etc. Want to work out all the hiccups in US first
How are you populating the dataset here? Anything we can to do help crowd source and contribute?
OSM, golfcourseapi.com, booking sites, etc. some help from AI to parse duplicates, bad locations. missing data.
Users can contribute right on the site by submitting corrections. It goes into a review queue and then is reviewed and implemented
That said if its in the US and incorrect or incomplete you can submit, but anything outside the US i'd wait until i do a first pass on the new regions.
Europe is missing!
yes im hoping to add in the next month or two after i get through north america
This map just shows how terrible more priviledged people are and destroy our environment for their rich boi "fun"
Well, golf fields are not as bad for environment as datac... I mean mines and factories.
Really, golf courses are taxed much lower usually, as they go as green open spaces (similar to protected forest areas), and also their assessed land value does not account for neighboring residential prices, so their tax is based on lower value than land can be sold at.
"Really, golf courses are taxed much lower usually, as they go as green open spaces (similar to protected forest areas"
That does not seem allright. A forest has lot's of ecodiversity, but a low cut golf course?
But sure, it is still green and somewhat alive.
Golf courses are often full of exclusively native foliage, often protected areas, and wetland areas. With much more ecodiversity support than neighboring businesses, residential areas, and even parks.
Yep, and I would not say they are "open spaces" if the owners yell at you for stepping on it.
you'll get yelled at for entering state parks if you don't pay.
Nope, you pay only for parking/camping (at least in CA and WA). You can legally walk on foot paying nothing.
The courses around me cost like $25-50 for a group tee time reservation. It's pretty cheap to get a set of second hand clubs, my small collection was had for like $75 over the years. You don't have to be rich to play golf.
Plus the golf courses around me are often municipal, they've got some nice bike paths to cut through the urban landscape around and through the links. It's a much nicer ride than along busy streets.
That said I do tend to enjoy disc golf more than traditional golf. I have never had too good of a shot.
You may not need to be rich to play golf, but you need to be rich to have the spare time to do it.
That then applies to practically any kind of recreation.
A city park and playground? Only for the rich, you need to be rich to have the spare time to do it.
A public swimming pool? Only for the rich, you need to be rich to have the spare time to do it.
A public baseball/softball/soccer field? Only for the rich, you need to be rich to have the spare time to do it.
An activity center with some basketball and tennis courts? Only for the rich, you need to be rich to have the spare time to do it.
Jogging trails through the woods? Only for the rich, you need to be rich to have the spare time to do it.
Picnic tables in a field? Who has the time to take their food out some place to eat it? Clearly only rich people with too much time on their hands.
The time it takes to play a game of golf is much longer than any of the other activities you mentioned.
I'm not especially fast and it normally takes me about two hours to play 9 holes. I also sometimes go to practice at the driving range or putting greens if I don't have that much time but want to do some golf things. It's not like one needs to do a full 18 holes every time you go golf.
How long do people normally spend at a public pool? How long will people spend playing basketball or tennis or baseball? How long is a soccer game usually? About a couple of hours?
clicked on a website link for a course near me and it took me to a weird site wopraja
probably and old site that now redirects.. you can report issues right on the site. community reports are going to be the most reliable for me over time.
Why free? Golfers have money.
Seems to be mostly be a US-only phenomenon
And even then, a broad generalisation
It’s $10 USD/round in my area, cheaper than bowling by a mile
Does that include club hire?
yeah maybe they'll donate one day.
so thats why lebron wanted to go to philadelphia or miami
100
It would be interesting to map this to parkinson's data.
Are you suggesting a causal link between Parkinson's Disease and golf course locations? Or is "Parkinson's" a golf term??
Some pesticides may be linked to Parkinson’s Disease cases
https://www.apdaparkinson.org/article/the-relationship-betwe...
That is what OP was trying to say I assume
Causal link: https://www.apdaparkinson.org/article/golf-course-concerns-n...
we needed this
Or just run Overpass OSM query with `node["leisure"="golf_course"]`
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL
This doesn't provide the same level of information I (or most golfers) are looing for