OpenStreetMap
This is my town, and I am quite familiar with it. I intend to update the map with local amenities and landmarks as well as editing roads to match actual physical locations.
So far I have removed three “roads” that are actually my mom’s drive and those of her neighbors.
Discussion
Comment from RM87 on 12 November 2012 at 21:53
It is always better to improve the existing ways then to remove them. You can tag driveways as highway=service and service=driveway + add suitable access tag: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Access
Comment from bmaura on 12 November 2012 at 22:51
This does not make any sense - are you arguing that a driveway ceases to be a driveway if it is over a certain length? Why only these three driveways mapped as roads and no others in the neighborhood? Many other homes in the area have a significant setback from the highway, as this is a rural area, and most people have a few fields or a pasture. None of these driveways are paved. All are one lane. They are clearly driveways and not roads.
Also, directly across the road from my mother’s home is a school with a curved driveway, which is not marked as a road. The inconsistency of this requirement seems to invalidate it.
If there is a standard requiring any drive over a certain length or all driveways to be labeled as roads, I think the signal-to-noise ratio of usable map information will be awful.
Comment from lyx on 12 November 2012 at 23:26
Well, the original TIGER data has a lot of driveways, alleys etc. marked as residentials highways (highway=residential), which is clearly an error and one of the problems with the TIGER data. So, to fix this problem, the driveways incorrectly marked as residential roads can be removed (which is perfectly ok), or they can be tagged as driveways (with highway=service, service=driveway) instead. In that case, where these driveways are private drives without public access, they should also be tagged as access=private.
Comment from aseerel4c26 on 13 November 2012 at 00:12
Hi bmaura, first of all: welcome to OSM! Nice that you’ve joined!
In addition to the other comments: Also note that our map is never complete and we have to start at some point. So … please do not delete bits of information in the map only because these bits are not mapped in other areas. Our map has by far not the same level of detail everywhere.
You can find some info about driveways in our wiki.
Comment from bmaura on 13 November 2012 at 00:43
I am confident that my mother’s dirt driveway is not, in fact, any sort of road, likewise those of her neighbors. I feel that there might be a language or localization issue at the heart of this - these driveways are unpaved, single lane, rural driveways just off a rural highway, leading directly to small single family homes, not private roads, restricted access roads or very long estate driveways.
Comment from aseerel4c26 on 13 November 2012 at 01:14
@bmaura: Hmm, well, even unpaved (sorry, I overlooked that - you mentioned it before). Well, at least the visitors of the people living in the single family homes could use osm to find the way to the house. ;-) And… these driveways exist in reality (paved or unpaved)… so I do not know why not to map them. They are also not something which could not be seen from outside and are not violating privacy if they would be mapped (unlike private garden swimming pools) - at least I think so. However, nobody mapped it in the first place (automatic import) … so, well, deletion might also be okay.
I am curious about other’s opinions and infos.
Comment from robert on 13 November 2012 at 13:29
Well, it is a road. It is possible to traverse it with a vehicle. It’s just a very minor one.
The attitude to have is “well, I’d better get the rest of them in then” rather than “I’d better delete this so it looks consistent”.
Otherwise when someone added the first power line in germany, someone else would have gone “can’t have this - none of the others are mapped - it looks wrong” and deleted it. Instead people continued to add to it and we now have the entire german power grid.
Comment from bmaura on 13 November 2012 at 18:02
I don’t think my mother would want her private driveway on a map as a road. There isn’t a turnaround for more than one car and I doubt she would welcome the liability involved in having her driveway listed as a road in public maps. What if someone were to mistakenly take her driveway, be forced to back out and then wreck? The legal implications are really frightening.
Comment from bmaura on 13 November 2012 at 18:03
Also, your analogy makes no sense in this context. It is a straw man argument.
Comment from bmaura on 13 November 2012 at 18:04
Can anyone point me to actual conventions beyond naming/tagging? Since there is not a consensus and apparently my being from the area being mapped is actually a strike against me.
Comment from lyx on 13 November 2012 at 20:41
A good starting point might be http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_States and the pages linked from there. An important background information that might take a while to discover on your own is that most of the US data on our map has been imported from other sources; for the street network the main source has been the TIGER data set (see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER ). This data set unfortunately had some serious quality problems, for example dirt driveways marked as normal road. You might have heard of that problem :-) In many other countries most of the data has been added by people collecting GPS traces or tracing aerial imagery. You might notice after a while that this leads to some cultural differences in the way people approach the problem of incorrect or incomplete map data. However, we have a common goal of working towards the best possible map and map data base ever. Outside the wiki there are mailing lists (see http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo ), of special interest to US mappers might be the talk-us list, and there is a webforum http://forum.openstreetmap.org/index.php (with among others a little used forum named users: United States). There is probably a lot of other stuff that I have forgot to mention, but you will find that yourself eventually.
Have fun mapping!
Comment from ingalls on 14 November 2012 at 00:06
I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding going on here. I have to agree with the other users in that it is usually a bad idea to improve it. I do agree with you in that I wouldn’t want my driveway to be listed as a road!! What was suggested above is to tag it as highway:service service:driveway and then access:private is better than removing it! This tells computers using the data that it is private and should not be accessed unless the computer is told specifically to do so. In Owensboro (One of my current projects - I have mapped hundreds of driveways - see here http://www.openstreetmap.org/export/embed.html?bbox=-87.08154,37.7478,-87.07363,37.75269&layer=mapnik
Since a driveway is visible from the street it should be mapped!! As long as it is marked as highway:service service:driveway, a computer would have no reason to ever route users up the street. (ie why send a user up a dead end street?).
Comment from z-dude on 14 November 2012 at 08:39
If you map it as ‘highway = service and as a private access driveway, gps devices will be smart enough to not use the road for routing.
It probably got onto the tiger maps because it was a long driveway that looked like a rural road.
Here’s what private roads look like on the map. http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=49.22943&lon=-122.75923&zoom=16&layers=M
Comment from Gary Hayden on 14 November 2012 at 14:59
I agree with ingalls and would like to add one note as well. I think that it’s important to view the map from an emergency management perspective as it is not too far fetched to consider that this data may be used with a variety of other sources in incident management at some later date. So the question to ask is: If I’m a first responder would it be useful to know the specific position/path of a private access road (i.e. driveway)? Most of the areas that I am editing require too much update for accuracy to spend time adding every little driveway (<50 ft)..but I do extract longer driveways where residences and structures are not directly adjacent to the roadside…and a clear path may not be easily identified. As long as they are marked access=private the will be excluded from traditional routing functions. Here is a link to an area that I recently completed for an example: http://www.openstreetmap.org/export/embed.html?bbox=-80.076205,40.510983,-80.070599,40.514796&layer=mapnik