[OSM-talk] service roads as driveways

[Robin Paulson]

2008/8/24 Inge Wallin <inge at lysator.liu.se>:
>> > i've been using service roads for a variety of small, relatively
>> > insignificant roads, such as alleyways between buildings, driveways to
>> > stately homes, roads around school/university/hospital campuses and so
>> > on, but something else recently has made me wonder whether to use it
>> > more: in auckland, there are thousands of houses with very long
>> > driveways, sometimes 300m. is this an acceptable use for the tag?
>>
>> IMO: yes, perfect usage.
>
> Are you sure?
>
> I used to think so too, but lately I have reconsidered.
>
> One way to look at highway=service is that it should be used for roads that we
> wouldn't really miss if they weren't rendered at all.  Good examples can be
> found above: roads between buildings, short drives to or on parking lots,
> roads to fuel stations, etc.
>
> Long driveways to houses *would* probably be missed, at least I would miss
> them. So I would myself instead use highway=unclassified, possibly with
> surface=unpaved if that is the case.

i think we'd miss all of those examples to be honest. the only ones we
wouldn't miss are the ones that don't get used...and petrol stations
at least are pretty popular. in that sense, i'd say a driveway is
below all the others i listed, as usually a maximum of 10 people use
it regularly

i'm not too keen on using highway=unclassified as it's generally seen
as more important to most mappers, and it's almost always for a public
road