[OSM-newbies] service:alley or highway:residential?

James Ewen ve6srv at gmail.com
Sun Mar 15 02:07:10 GMT 2009


On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 7:28 PM, Simon Ward <simon at bleah.co.uk> wrote:

>> This road is clearly NOT part of the public residential road network.
>> This access road network is owned and maintained by the housing
>> cooperative.
>
> Who said highway=residential has to be part of a public road network?
> How about: highway=residential; access=private?

No one so far... I would tag a back alley with highway:service with a
sub-tag of service:alley. This would be part of the road network
maintained by the city. There's no distinction made between this
highway:service as a public roadway versus the aforementioned
highway:service as a private driveway, except for the sub-tag. There's
no distinction made concerning the ownership.

I don't know if I would agree with tagging the roadway as
access:private, as the road network is accessible by the general
public. There are no access restrictions.

The reason for tagging the roadway as something other than
highway:residential is to have it depicted on the map as something
other than a residential street. One should not expect to be able to
turn off of the residential street network, and into a complex such as
this, and continue driving in the same manner. The road network in the
housing complex is much narrower, and not designed for the higher
speeds that the residential network is designed for.

The whole reason that we tag highway:motorway on a main highway is so
that it gets rendered differently than a highway:residential street.
By looking at the physical attributes of the line drawn on the map,
one can make assumptions about what the roadway will look like in the
real world. So why would we tag a roadway that is very much physically
different from a residential street with a tag that does not describe
it properly? We have tags that describe the physical properties of the
roadway, let's use them.

James
VE6SRV




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