OpenStreetMap
At what point is a driveway long enough to be added to OSM?
Posted by Horza on 4 April 2019 in English.I’ve noticed a spate of small edits of people adding single driveways in the areas I’ve been mapping so it has brought me back to a question I’ve never quite come up with a satisfactory answer for:
At what point is a driveway so long that it should be added to the map?
Most driveways in this area are only a few car lengths long and it feels a little bit ridiculous to add all of those, on the other end of the scale you’ve got driveways to houses off Mandarin Road that are 300+ yards long that probably should be
What’s the cut off point between those two?
I haven’t come up with an answer that I find satisfying yet, so have been leaving it alone, but it’d be nice to make this whole thing a bit more systematic, instead of a hodgepodge of single driveways being added
Discussion
Comment from yvecai on 4 April 2019 at 21:23
The shorter driveway on the map is most certainly one a mapper bother to map. It’s up to every contributor, I guess.
Comment from Horza on 4 April 2019 at 21:41
True. It might just be one of those things with a fuzzy boundary condition. My other one in this area is what’s the difference between a pond and a lake since there are dozens of retention ponds in this area varying in size between about the size of a house and the biggest at about 8 hectares (aka definitely a lake XD)
I’ll try to be systematic about what I do, but yes, this is probably something for people to decide on for themselves
Comment from Glassman on 5 April 2019 at 05:34
Take a look at the person who added the driveway - they may work for Amazon.
To your question about how long should a driveway be before it’s added, my opinion is that if it can be ground truthed, then it can be added, even if its only a few meters long. Mapping even short driveways does have an advantage - it says there is a driveway.
Comment from Hjart on 5 April 2019 at 06:25
In my country I’m seeing a few entusiastic hobbyists adding very short driveways, while I personally would only ever add longer driveways. My stance is that very short driveways doesn’t really have much practical value. But I guess this is one of those issues that are up to personal judgement.
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️🌈 on 5 April 2019 at 07:17
It’s up to you. I wouldn’t add a driveway that’s only one car long, but if it was more, I probably would. Often in rural areas, people have big driveways, and I’d like them mapped to show that the main road has so many little junctions coming into it.
Comment from Horza on 5 April 2019 at 12:05
@Glassman Haha, yes, lots of small edits from Amazon workers. Usually a single service road or driveway. I can get why that’s useful for them.
Every house here has a driveway, and Mandarin loves trees so sometimes it’s the only way I know there’s a house under the trees. I’d say adding them all was a lot of work but I’ve been adding outlines for every house already so very little extra compared to that
@Hjart I guess if people think it’s useful. I can think of crazier things to be completionist about
@Rorym Yeah definitely seems useful then. Especially in areas where it’s hard to work out exactly which street near a house it actually connects to
Comment from EdLoach on 5 April 2019 at 13:28
I don’t usually map driveways, but I can see if you wanted pedestrian routing (perhaps for those with a visual impairment) to the front door of a property then you probably would want the drive mapped, and perhaps even a short footway from drive to door for connectivity.
Comment from Hjart on 5 April 2019 at 13:57
One really annoying issue with all these driveways in some areas is that many of them end close enough to each other to get flagged on OSMI etc. I’ve tried explaining the problem to some of the creators, but unfortunately they don’t appear to get it and so it’s purely up to regular OSMI users like myself to put noexit tags at the last node of every damn one of all these driveways created by other people :-(
Comment from Horza on 5 April 2019 at 17:02
@EdLoach I can see that being useful, especially as sidewalks are not ubiquitous in the area I’m currently mapping. I’ve been adding sidewalk tags to roads that have them, but that’s been a bit piecemeal and it’s a pain to check whether everything is already tagged properly in an area. I’ve been wondering if it would be better to just separately map them.
@Hjart I can see that being a pain. I’ve not used OSMI before. Looks interesting and I can see a few issues tagged near where I map I can check out
Comment from Glassman on 5 April 2019 at 17:38
Recently I’ve done a lot of pedestrian mapping in Mount Vernon and Burlington WA. Having even short segments of driveway, if they contained curb/kerb info would be valuable. A number of streets in my town only have short segments of sidewalks, that just end in someone’s yard. Knowing that a wheelchair user could navigate via a driveway to the street which as some point connects to a sidewalk with a ramp would be helpful.
@Hjart I’m not sure what is the point of putting a noexit tag on the last node. The wiki discussion page even suggests adding a noexit tag to cul-de-sacs. Instead of adding the noexit tag, ask Geofabrik (Frederik Ramm) to removing the warning.
I’ve asked a friend to get me a contact with the Amazon team to see if we can get some help on this issue.
Comment from Hjart on 5 April 2019 at 17:39
@Horza Those sidewalks. You’re not familiar with Overpass queries?
Comment from Horza on 5 April 2019 at 18:06
@Glassman That does sound very useful. Pretty sure driveways and bits around intersections are the only lowered kerb areas in my neighbourhood. The sidewalk network around here can be a bit random like that too.
@Hjart No, I’ve been pretty much working everything out on here by myself, occasionally asking people about things when ambiguities pop up like this, occasionally stumbling upon features by happenstance (like that you can use bing Streetside stuff)
Anyway, that sounds useful. Thanks. It looks like Overpass turbo is the convenient web interface? I’ll read up on the wiki page for that
Comment from Hjart on 5 April 2019 at 18:15
@Glassman The OSMI warnings are in fact useful (which is why I check them). Removing them is not a real option
Comment from Hjart on 5 April 2019 at 18:49
Comment from Horza on 5 April 2019 at 18:56
@HJart Thanks! That should be super helpful
Comment from Hjart on 5 April 2019 at 19:02
Note that the “or” between highway=residential & highway=tertiary appears to have caused the formatting of my previous comment