How we source rules
Beach pages cite official government sources. Park pages use OpenStreetMap under the ODbL, with honest gaps and thin-page noindex rules.
This directory is built so that a search for dog-friendly beaches near you, or for a fenced dog park, ends on a page that can show its work. Beach rules come from official government sources and are dated. Park features come from OpenStreetMap, with the gaps left visible. This page is the method.
Two datasets, two standards
Beaches. Phase 1 listings are a curated official-source set for California, Florida, Texas, New York and Washington, not a scrape of Google Maps and not a copy of another directory. Each beach page has an official source URL, a date we read that source (for this build, 14 November 2026), and a rules section that only includes what that source states. If a popular beach had no official page we could cite, it is not in the set yet. If the official page is ambiguous, we say so, and we do not upgrade “not verified” into a yes.
The beaches hub and the state hubs are the index of that work. Examples of the standard in practice: Rosie's cites the City of Long Beach; Jupiter cites the town; Volusia County locations cite the county dogs-on-the-beach page and the Beach Code; Southampton town beaches cite Town Code § 150-5.1; Padre Island National Seashore cites the National Park Service; California State Parks beaches cite the official Visiting State Parks With Your Dog table.
Parks. Park listings are generated from OpenStreetMap objects tagged leisure=dog_park in the five Phase 1 states. We drop access=private, residents, members, customers and clearly commercial sites. We do not scrape Google Maps. Fence, water, lighting, surface and hours appear only when tagged. A missing tag is “not verified,” not “no.” Off-leash is labelled “typically off-leash” when the only evidence is the dog-park tag itself. See the parks hub and Fenced versus off-leash.
OpenStreetMap data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and is available under the Open Database License. A derived park database must be attributed and shared under ODbL. That attribution is in the footer of every page.
What we will not do
We will not invent an hour, a leash length or an off-leash verb because a travel blog used one. We will not treat a missing OSM fence tag as “unfenced,” or a missing water tag as “no water.” We will not use Google Maps or Apify scrapes as a source. We will not copy another directory's text. We will not add a live analytics tag before launch, and this site is not published yet.
When two official pages disagree, we cite both and say so. Brohard Paw Park is the example: the City of Venice official page lists 7 a.m. to dusk; a Sarasota County facility directory has listed 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. We do not pick a winner. When a general rule and a park-specific line sit in tension — New York State Parks “park wide” language next to a general ban on dogs in bathing areas, or Washington's SCA off-leash-if-control language next to a park page that says “dogs allowed on leash” — we describe the tension and send you to the signs.
City names, thin pages and what is indexable
City names on park pages come from OSM addr:city when present. Otherwise we assign the nearest city from the free SimpleMaps US Cities database, used locally, attributed, and not redistributed. Campus census points in that database (for example a university label sitting next to a real town) are skipped so that a park in Davis is not labelled as “University of California-Davis.”
Some OSM parks have only a fallback name (“Dog park in …,” “Unnamed dog park”) and no amenity data at all: no fence tag, no hours, no water, no website, no explicit off-leash tag beyond the default. Those pages still exist, and we still link to them, but they carry a noindex robots tag and are left out of the sitemap. The directory should not ask a search engine to rank an empty page next to a beach listing that cites an ordinance. Parks with a real name, or with at least one verified amenity field, remain indexable.
How a beach listing is written
We read the official page, record the date, and write a leash-rule field that a person could defend in front of that page. Hours are copied or clearly paraphrased when the official source gives them, including seasonal windows. Rules are a short bullet list, not a rewrite. Coordinates are approximate, from the official address or named access, and are labelled as such, for the map only.
We include on-leash official beaches, not only off-leash ones, because that is how people actually search for dog-friendly beaches near them. A leashed winter walk on a Southampton town beach, or a six-foot-leash walk at Leo Carrillo North Beach, is still a dog-friendly beach with a rule you can cite.
We also include official pages that say “this is not a dog beach” but still allow leashed dogs in a defined area, such as Clearwater Beach north of Somerset Street. The official wording stays in the listing. The job is not to market the sand. It is to report the rule.
How to use the method yourself
If you want to check us, or to check a beach we have not listed yet, the method is the same:
- Find a city, county, state-parks or NPS page, or the municipal code, not a hotel blog.
- Write down the date you read it.
- Copy the hours, the leash rule, and the mapped boundary in the official words.
- If the official page is silent, write “not stated” instead of filling the gap.
- Look at the signs when you arrive; if they disagree, follow the signs and treat the website as stale.
That is also the method behind How to read off-leash rules and seasonal closures. The about page repeats the attribution. The Off-Leash Rules Book will take the same standard into a longer, paid guide, with packing checklists, once it is approved and actually on sale. There is no checkout on that page yet.
The test of this source method is simple. If you cannot open the official link and find the rule we cited, we should not have published the sentence. If you can, the page has done its job, even when the honest answer is “not verified.”
What “Phase 1” covers, and what it does not
The beach set is official-source coverage for five states, not a complete US inventory and not a complete inventory even of those five. Florida in particular is still thinner than California, because many Florida towns prohibit dogs on the municipal beach and we only list places with a citable allowance. We did not add Destin, Fort Walton Beach or Canaveral National Seashore ocean beaches, for example, because the official pages we read do not allow dogs on those beaches. A gap in the directory is often a prohibition, not an omission we forgot to scrape.
The park set is broader and noisier, because OSM is broader and noisier. We filter private and commercial sites and we noindex the thinnest leftover pages, but we do not field-verify thousands of parks. Amenity completeness is low: fence, hours and water tags are scarce. That is described, not hidden, on the park pages and in the build notes.
Later phases may add more official beaches, more states, and official park hours where a city or county open-data portal publishes them. Each of those additions will have to pass the same test as this one: a source you can open, a date we opened it, and no invented rule in between.
If you want a deeper, portable version of the same standard, including packing checklists, that is the point of The Off-Leash Rules Book. Until checkout is connected, this method page is the public version of the editorial policy.
The Off-Leash Rules Book will go deeper, including packing checklists, once it is on sale.