[Talk-us] Should driveways be on OSM?

[stevea]

>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?

Don't delete them, fix them.  That's the OSM method.  I find 
driveways, when already entered, quite useful and helpful additional 
data.  Sometimes I'll enter them myself especially when they are long 
and give access to what is otherwise inaccessible or if they allow 
pedestrian easement to a trailhead or public land, (as they sometimes 
do) as was mentioned earlier.  This latter reason makes OSM superior 
to many other maps for certain data consumers (e.g. hikers). 
Driveways can also stand out as visually distinct access=private 
parts of the road network that are "there" (on the ground, in real 
life...) but "you can't use."  This only SEEMS like it isn't useful, 
but in some use cases, it is.

Let's be careful with wholesale deletion due to personal taste of 
certain data categories.  If it is truly wrong, fix it if possible. 
Delete it as a last resort, only when it is correct to do so.

SteveA
California