Hi, I’m new to mapping and have been doing relatively simple updates in my local area but I could do with some advice on the following which I’m trying not to mess up.
Currently there is a local bridleway to me which seems to serve a dual purpose as a service road for a couple of farms and a couple of other businesses.
On OSM it is currently shown as a Service road with
Allowed access is All=Yes, with the addition of foot=designated
Currently it is also tagged foot=designated (but doesn’t mention bicycles or horses).
and highway=service
Is it best to just to add the tags bicycle=designated, horse=designated to the service road?
Or should I change the service road to a bridleway because that is what it’s signed on the ground. Bridleways normally don’t allow motorised vehicles so should I also add access motor vehicles=destination or designated as there is permission for their vehicles to use the bridleway but not really for general vehicular use (it’s mostly paved tarmac with a more gravel like surface at it’s end).
The single best tag (assuming you are in England & Wales) is to add designation=public_bridleway which implicitly marks the way as yes for foot, bicycle & horse, so adding these as designated is redundant. We have quite a few tools to track whether rights of way are mapped and marked as such (Map the Paths & Mathmos’ PRoW pages: https://osm.mathmos.net/prow/)),
Service roads with no access tags should generally be assumed to be access=destination, so access=all should probably go (the generic access tag is often better replaced by mode specific tags anyway.
The situation of a bridleway starting as a service road is very common, and one big advantage of OSM is that one can show that this is the case by using separate tags for highway and right of way classification (designation). Note there are some bridleways which are highway=unclassified too (there’s one in Surrey near Capel & one in Mapperley, Derbyshire, which come to mind).
For UK-specific queries the UK forum is probably a better place to ask about anything to do with bridleways as mappers from elsewhere are often (obviously) unfamiliar with the specific circumstances which apply in the UK (E&W particularly).
