[Talk-us] Disney (was Re: access=destination vs access=private)

[Greg Troxel]

Anthony <osm at inbox.org> writes:

> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Phil! Gold <phil_g at pobox.com> wrote:
>> The US doesn't seem to have the strict legal categories for rights-of-way
>> that the UK does
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by that, as I'm not familiar with UK law.
> But the US definitely has a concept of "public right of way" vs.
> "private property".  The access=destination key/value was clearly
> meant for the former.  There is still a note in the source of the wiki
> which explains what access=destination means in the US - "no thru
> traffic" or "local traffic only" (USA).  That is completely different
> from "customers only".

I think Anthony has it exactly right here.

The basic problem is that access= is mostly about legal rights of
access, but it's been blurred to be also about permission to access land
that one has no legal right to demand.  For almost all parking lots that
are private property, people have no right of access at all.

So we could take the existing tags, where =customer is perhasp not
existing, and have a hierarchy:

access=yes
access=destination
access=permissive (no legal right, but not objected to)
*access=customers
access=private (no right, permission not granted to the public)
access=no (hard to tell what this means - doesn't make sense)

or we could have

access=yes (public right of way, which may be a 'private way')
access=destination (legal right of way if reasonable/proper to get where
   you are going, or only way, depending on local law)
access=private (no right of access, but permission might or might not be
   granted)

and also

access_permission=permissive
access_permission=customer
access_permission=private

But, I don't think access vs access_permission is helpful in practice,
even if it is semantically clearer.

I do think it's broken to misappropriate access=destination to mean
access=customers (even though I've been doing it also for parking lots).

The disney employee discussion points out that while
access_permission=customer is a relatively straightforward concept,
access_permission=private conveys only

  If you don't have some special agreement, you can't go here.

but doesn't encode the set of people that have permission.  I think it's
madness to put that in the map, and people should perhaps have a side
database of what they've been granted permission to do, or gasp just
look at the map and figure it out.

The real question is what routers should do.  Probably the best that can
be done is to put a high cost on access=destination and even higher on
access_permission=private and note this on the results.  Typically you'd
only be routed over those when going someplace where you have
permission.


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