Access=yes on roads

Help and support
1

Sometimes I see taggning “access=yes” on public roads, with no other taggs about access.

Is this an unnecessary taggning?

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It depends on the type of road. A highway=residential implies access=yes while a highway=primary implies only motorcar=yes and hgv=yes. At least according to Wiki. What routers do with it is another matter.
Without knowing the position, I would probably remove the access, since yes is very broad anyway. That would allow skiers, tanks, ships, trains, horse carriages and much more. So rather go into more detail instead of just saying “everything is allowed here”.

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I guess we’re lucky, routers aren’t stupidly following this, otherwise motorcycles or buses wouldn’t be allowed. I prefer this page for default access restrictions, because they have to vary by country.

Other than that, access=yes is usually wrong on roads.

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Might be useful in cases where a road looks like it might be in a restricted access gated community of have a private road, but actually is a public roads.

Otherwise sounds like someone feeling compelled to fill out every field in a preset even when the"default assumption" would be fine

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That’s what note=* is for.

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Thanks for all comments!

I usually remove “access=yes” on roads where I can’t see has any meaning. Which means almost always.

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Sometimes it makes sense to add specific “obvious” tags where there are significant local exceptions Examples might include:

  • A oneway=no amongst lots of oneway=yes roads
  • A motorway that doesn’t allow cyclists in a country or state that normally does

I’m sure that someone could think up a similar example for “access=yes”, but most of the time it wouldn’t make sense to add for a public road.

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Wouldn’t motor_vehicle=yes be more appropriate in that situation?

access=yes in mainly problematic because its relationship to implicit restrictions is not clear. If we assume that it resets them, then you would have to add all implicit rules explicitly, which is lets say “difficult” to get right. The same goes for access=no, which, except for the case in which literally all access is denied, has the same issues, and is mostly an indication that the tagging is wrong.

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well, it does not mean that it implies =no for anything else

personally I would remove this “implication” as confusing and not adding useful info

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I posted wrong information above (which I now deleted to avoid more confusion). The wiki for Austrian shared spaces does not suggest access=yes in those cases, so my post was offtopic.
Details: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:Tag:highway%3Dliving_street#Begegnungszonen

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Remove the information on the wiki or remove the content in my answer?

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remove it on the wiki

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At best, those lines in the wiki are extremely unhelpful. It’d be interesting to try and find out who edited it to say that and discuss with them what they were trying to say.

In practice, the traffic that can use a highway=primary will be “most traffic, including regular motorised and non-motorised traffic, but subject to local laws and a local community’s definition of what roads should be highway=primary”.

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Did you ask the mapper why they tag access=yes? There maybe strange access restrictions they did not get right.

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No I didn’t ask

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It was already in the initial version, a long time ago, before the consequences of that kind of thing was even really established.

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https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Tag:highway%3Dprimary&diff=2481739&oldid=2425170

added

The traffic that can use a highway=primary will be most traffic, including regular motorised and non-motorised traffic, but subject to local laws and what exactly is tagged as highway=primary various limitations and exceptions may apply.

removed confusing implies (also from confusing data item construct)

(I just copied content from your comment, hopefully it can be used on wiki, let me know if not)

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FWIW, access=yes is genuinely useful with tags such as highway=service where access is otherwise unclear/ambiguous.

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access=yes is also sometimes used in the UK for unclassified highways (note: these are not the same as highway=unclassified in OSM terminology).

I also sometimes use it along with UK byways as clarifies that access is for all traffic types - which may not be expected by the highway type.

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FWIW, access=yes is genuinely useful with tags such as highway=service where access is otherwise unclear/ambiguous.

yes, and also for barriers like gates

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