[Tagging] highway=service major type sub-classification - mini vote

[Greg Troxel]

ael <law_ence.dev at ntlworld.com> writes:

> On Sat, Apr 16, 2016 at 10:32:14PM +0200, Tom Pfeifer wrote:
>> Michał Brzozowski wrote on 2016/04/16 20:03:
>> >I think you miss the point. When there's no service key, you have no
>> >idea whether it doesn't fit in the current set of (parking_aisle,
>> >driveway...), or it is indeed but hasn't been tagged because the
>> >mapper didn't provide this information. It's an informational
>> >consistency problem, peculiarity of the way we handle things, namely
>> >non-distinction between "inapplicable" and "unknown".
>
> I seldom use a service subtag except parking_aisle because I don't
> quite know what "driveway" or "alley" means. I am a GB native English speaker.
> These are not defined on the Key:service page. In GB English, an alley
> would normally be tagged as a footway.

It may be that these two words are from US English.  I am a native en_US
speaker.

"driveway" refers to a place you can drive to go from a real road
("public way" or "private way") to someplace, sometimes a house, and
sometimes a business.  For houses, people often park in the driveway as
well.  Driveways are often just parts of a larger parcel, whereas at
least in Massachusetts, real roads are legally separate pieces of land.

Part of the the tagging difficulty is that there are several subcases:

  residential (a house or two) driveway.  Often these aren't mapped, and
  they aren't that important to map.  The USGS (similar to OS in
  mapping) used to show driveways that were particularly long, but not
  the rest.

  Businesses that are set back, with a long access road, often two lane
  with a yellow lane - but still legally not a road.

  Businesses and apartment buildings close to a road, where the access
  is through a parking lot, and it's hard to tell which of the ways are
  the main ones for access vs just parking_aisle.

In en_US, the first two are always called driveway, and the third not so
much by regular people.

In en_US, alley is generally a road where you can drive, but which is so
narrow or otherwise awkward that it is only used for access to the rear
of buildings along it, or for people in those buildings to park.   A
1-2m wide gap for foot traffic only would typically not be called an
alley, or if it would, someone who understood OSM would never call it
highway=service service=alley.


Overall, I lean to adding parking_primary as a tag case for the main
ways in parking lots, and perhaps major_driveway for the second case
above, where the driveway is far more important than a house driveway,
because it's two lanes and has significant (>50m?) length, or otherwise
is more substantial than a normal house driveway (which might be only 5m
long, and if longer than about 15m is usually one car width).



So, all in all, I lean to adding specific subtags for identifiable cases
where there are gaps, and avoiding a "major" catchall.
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