[Talk-us] guidelines regarding roads access

[Greg Troxel]

Adam Franco <adamfranco at gmail.com> writes:

> One additional note is that at least in my area, the TIGER import
> incorrectly added access=private to many driveways and privately maintained
> residential roads. Upon surveying these I've found that they are signed
> "Private" or "PVT" on the street-name sign to indicate
> private-maintenance/ownership (don't complain to the town about a lack of
> snow-plowing/grading), but do not in reality have an access restriction.

For a "private way" (legal term in my state for what I think you refer
to as "privately maintained residential road"), I agree that there
shouldn't be access=private.

For a driveway to someone's house, access=private seems right, in that
it's generally at least impolite to use that road other than as
visitor/delivery/etc.

Are you saying that you think access=private on say a 100m driveway from
a real public road to a single house should have no access tag (or
access=yes)?  If so, I don't understand why.

[Veering off into an adjacent topic...]

But, that tends to lead to pink blobs in rendering, and I'm not sure
that's the right thing, as service roads having the status "you should
use these only when dealing with the adjacent entities" seems to be the
default/normal case.  We should adjust rendering, not access, to make
this pleasing.

So I have been putting access=private on driveways for residences and
businesses that don't welcome the public (industrial) as I edit, and not
putting that on servie/driveways for businesses that do welcome the
public (retail and some commercial, more or less).

Part of the issue here is that when thinking about routing, humans know
that osm-ways that are private can be used if they are associated with
your destination (and you have permission/invitation to the
destination).  So perhaps we need some sort of association between ways
and destinations, but that seems like a lot of work, and a lot of bits
in the database, without a clear rationale to a win for routers.


I notice that OSMand has been asking (roughly) "destination is in/near
access=private; ok to use those"?  I'm not sure what I think of this; it
seems that it's normal to use access=private to get someplace if that's
what it takes, since the default assumption of "route me to X" is "it's
ok for me to go to X".  The hard part is if where you want to go isn't
on the same lot, and that private way just happens to be the closest.
This is usually because of a missing driveway for where you are going,
though, so it's reasonable to take the viewpoint that there's a map
error/omission and that the router behavior will be right once that's
fixed.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 162 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20170924/18d48a80/attachment.sig>