We have around 20,000 tags hgv=no in Canada (taginfo) and about a thousand related tags in hgv:conditional (taginfo).
I presume this is usually tagged in response to signs like Rb-62:
It appears that in many cases this actually means something more like hgv=destination, because there is an exception for vehicles which need to use the street/road to reach their destination.
This came up in discussion of Changeset: 162096755 | OpenStreetMap in Toronto. Brant County has a page about heavy truck routes that also says “This does not include a vehicle making a delivery to, or a collection from, a bona fide destination which cannot be reached via a highway or highways upon which heavy vehicles are not prohibited, having taken the most direct route to the destination.” So does municipality of Halton Hills which says “Heavy trucks excepted only if the location cannot be reached by any other road, and the shortest possible route is taken.”
I couldn’t find an Ontario-wide regulation, and I didn’t check other provinces.
Just wanted to ask if others have thoughts on this?
Does anyone know if the destination exception is general or per-municipality, and if general, can it be sourced?
Is there general agreement that this sign should get tag hgv=destination, and if yes, what if anything should get tag hgv=no?
At least in BC (and in the US), this would mean “No trucks at all” barring any supplemental placard that says something like “Except local deliveries” below it.
First of all truck traffic rules, including the designation of truck routes and erecting “no trucks” signs, are (generally) within the purview of municipalities, in just the same way the provinces delegate the power to change speed limits, put up stop signs, etc. to the municipalities. So these rules are going to vary from municipality to municipality. You’re not going to find any province-wide legislation.
Secondly, let’s not get truck routes confused with the prohibitory signage. The routes are designated for truck travel through an area: they don’t (generally) prohibit trucks elsewhere. That’s what the “no trucks” sign is meant for: specifically prohibiting trucks from a roadway.
The number and quality of such signage varies wildly across municipalities, in my experience. Some are better at identifying conditional exclusions, particularly time, weight and length. Practically speaking there are many roadways—especially in urban and suburban residential areas—that trucks and buses would never reasonably be able to traverse anyway. And if they could, a lot of municipalities won’t allow them outside of business hours.
Anecdotally in my experience most two-axle trucks—delivery trucks, moving vans and the like—are de facto exempted from these restrictions, while larger multi-axle trucks—especially tractor-trailers—must de facto avoid most roads where “no trucks” signage is present because they wouldn’t fit anyway! We don’t really have a current tag to distinguish these, as far as I know…
I would err on the side of caution and presume most roads with a “no trucks” sign ought to be tagged hgv=no.
That said the example change set you provided, with a Cadbury chocolates factory on an otherwise residential road, seems like a reasonable exception. I wonder though, does that street (Gladstone Avenue) actually prohibit trucks entirely? Dundas seems pretty busy; from afar I wonder if the Cadbury trucks are allowed to approach the factory from Dundas, but are prohibited to approach from College Street.
Yep, sorry if the reference to truck routes was confusing, I only included them for the references to the exceptions to the prohibitory signs.
In this case the Toronto bylaw really does list the stretch of Gladstone Avenue in question (it is covered by between “Peel Avenue and the lane first north of Sylvan Avenue”), and has no distinction on direction. It’s the intriguingly-named Schedule XXX: https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/municode/toronto-code-950-30.pdf (which is also quite long, almost 500 PDF pages!)
At the risk of trying to guess motivation behind regulations, some Toronto regulations are quite clearly intended at traffic management, and the 7pm-7am prohibitions are clear attempts at noise management. A truck that can travel a route at 6:50pm could physically also do it at 7:10pm.
My local highway=tertiary has the “no trucks 7pm-7am” sign and it’s a straight line for the entire 2 km extent of the prohibition and connects non-prohibited streets. It’s by no means a great truck route, but it’s physically possible and in fact used by tractor-trailers semi-regularly, and other nearby streets (tertiaries as well as secondaries) which are physically comparable and also subjectively not great truck routes aren’t blessed with the prohibition.
hgv:conditional=destination @ (19:00-07:00) would probably be a better match than no on a street like this:
Though on the flip side, the sign intuitively looks like no, and I doubt anyone is actually routing trucks and looking at hgv=no in OSM in practice…
It would have to go off geometry, maybe with width=* and parking:*=* tags. I wonder if there’s any tag for corner radii? Estimating fit off width and parking could probably be attempted, though I doubt it would give substantially better results than simply routing trucks on highest road grade possible for as long as possible…
Now I’m having the thought that tagging that sign hgv=no might be similar to lack of differentiation between bicycle=no and bicycle=dismount, and equivalent horse=* tags: there’s technically a difference, but it can be hard to determine the proper value, and meanwhile bicycle=no is an intuitive tag for mappers, so it’s been used extensively, and in practice data users have to guess what no really means.
Absolutely a lot of the prohibitory signage is just traffic management. I’m sure the pictured 7 pm to 7 am prohibition on Roncesvalles Avenue is purely noise management too.
However, what happens if a truck makes a delivery to that Starbucks on Roncesvalles at 1 am, and a resident complains? By the letter of the law they’re exempted from the posted restriction, but in my anecdotal experience—one of my uncles was a long-time dispatcher for Sysco —a delivery along a road with a posted time restriction was sure to incur the wrath of bylaw officers.
I’m sure the pictured 7 pm to 7 am prohibition on Roncesvalles Avenue is purely noise management too.
—a delivery along a road with a posted time restriction was sure to incur the wrath of bylaw officers.