Author: Harry Wood
[Added to the original trac issue at 5.05pm, Monday, 29th June 2009]

(17:56:01) zere: harry-wood: yeah, i think osm2pgsql chooses each feature as an area or a line. it looks like it needs to change that assumption

Author: jburgess777[at]googlemail.com
[Added to the original trac issue at 11.21pm, Monday, 29th June 2009]

I have a patch I wrote about a year ago to implement this but in the end I decided that this is not the right answer.

I think a given way needs to represent a single feature, otherwise tags like name, ref, access etc become ambiguous. If I made the code generate both the linear and area features for these sorts of cases then it would render incorrectly for others, e.g. "highway=footway, area=yes".

I believe that creating two ways is the best answer here.

Author: Ldp
[Added to the original trac issue at 3.03am, Monday, 10th August 2009]

Duplicated the way in question, tagged it as leisure=park, and removed that tag from the original way.

Doesn't solve this ticket in the strictest sense, but a "one element per feature" strategy sounds best in this case.