[Talk-us] Should driveways be on OSM?

[Kevin Kenny]

On 09/28/2015 01:33 AM, Tom Bloom wrote:
> TIGER drew thousands of driveways that are often simply wrong. They 
> are tagged private and in my opinion spoil the map appearance with 
> little red squiggles all over the place. No other map I've found 
> includes them. Looking around the country, I notice some areas where 
> they were removed, changed to service roads, drawn de novo, and one 
> area (near Rosebud, OR) where they were inexplicably changed to 
> living_street, which they just aren't.
>
> I've been deleting them if wildly wrong, and would like to delete all 
> I encounter. Any ideas?
>
> (I mostly map in the Midwest)

Are they wrong? Fix them, or delete them. I often delete hallucinations 
that we got from TIGER. What seems to have happened around here is that 
the Census people drew fictitious roads up to people's "off the grid" 
cabins, or in one case someone's eyes crossed and he continued a line 
miles after the road ended, following first a walking trail and then an 
intermittent stream, both of which are on topographic maps. I've 
discovered that the out-and-out fictions are easy to spot because they 
usually consist of a single straight line segment striking willy-nilly 
across topographic features to the nearest road.

Are they right? If it's in the field, why shouldn't it be on the map?

Since most of the mapping that I do is afoot, mapping things that 
automobiles can't get to, I have no objection to driveways and tracks, 
particularly when they lead to trailhead parking!

The last thing that I recall mapping as 'driveway' had a bit that was 
'highway=service service=driveway access=private foot=yes'. Hikers have 
an easement to use it, and it bypasses a spot that otherwise requires 
getting your feet wet. I'd consider its deletion to be vandalism. I 
mapped the rest of the driveway from aerial images so as to avoid the 
anomaly of a disconnected bit of highway.

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin