[Tagging] service=rural (Was Rural Alley?)

[johnw]

> On Jul 12, 2015, at 8:07 AM, Warin <61sundowner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> What you are trying to map is a landuse rather than the highways service? 

Imagine you live on a farm and you’ve never seen a a big city's alley - how would you explain why there is a narrow road next to the main road? the main road is “too busy?” do they really need to make the road so narrow it is not useful for much else than local access?

In the city and suburban areas, we recognize that there is a road below residental/unclassified, but is not a track. We call it an Alley, and define it through highway=service & service=alley. Alleys would then connect to driveways, tracks, and other more local access roads. 

In my extensive driving experience in rural California, OSM’s definition of rural roads works very well. There are no rural alleys. There are service roads for individual facilities, but not in the public/narrow/parallel  “alley” sense. 

But when mapping Rural Japan, IMO, there *is* a road grade between unclassified/residential and Track. It is not too difficult to see them when you live here, but it is difficult to explain. The guy mapping Korea chimed in that it is similar there. The road network in rural ares is *as dense and complicated* as the city to facilitate access to farm field sections or other rural land-uses. The sections are further subdivided by tracks/paths/driveways, like a city. I bet in other very rural, old, and high population density countries (in Asia),  this is the case too, if they have money to maintain all of these paved roads. 

And using track+grade1 on them seems wrong. 

So I would like to formalize a rural sibling for alley. I called it service=rural, becuase it’s counterpart is found in cities and suburbs.


Javbw
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