I was looking into some tags of paths on Curaçao inside a national park and noticed they were not considered as accessible by the route planner. (For example Way: Christoffel Hike Trail - Yellow (26820925) | OpenStreetMap). They are tagged with access=customer, and although you do actually have to pay to access these roads, it seems wrong to use these tags for a national park?
What is typically used for national parks ?
There is an entrance-fee for the park: Opening Hours & Fees | Christoffelpark Curacao
fee=yes?
toll=yes?
Yes there is, just like I mentionned. But is access=customer really the way to tag these type of roads ?
Technically you can only use these ways if you are a customer of Christoffelpark, so access=customer is correct.
I once visited Relation: Potawatomi State Park (6186516) | OpenStreetMap where you have to put the entrance-fee into an envelope at the gate. Here none of the ways are tagged with access…
Cf last week Access=customers inside National Parks
As I mentioned in the above linked topic, I don’t think access tagging is the right model for parks with entrance fees. Some combination of fee=yes and/or toll=yes fits better.
Generalizing a bit, areas where an entrance fee or toll is charged are not uncommon. Congestion pricing zones in cities like London and New York are another example besides parks. I don’t think it’s reasonable for every feature within these areas to be tagged to indicate the entrance fee. A model where we can tag fee/toll/access information on an area boundary and data consumers can post process in order to apply this to the features within would be far more maintainable.
You can argue that it is not blatantly wrong, but it looks like setting up trap and making it harder to process for no benefit.
I would express “you need to pay to use it” in other way, similarly marking paid motorways as access=customers would be likely breaking routing even if technically it sort of fits.
Just use toll=yes
I agree that toll=yes is a much better option for such cases than access=customers.
I think the wiki for access=customers also points in this direction:
access=customers is meant for situations where someone only may use element A (such as a road, parking, toilet) when they are customers of / pay for another element (B: a shop, restaurant, hotel etc..).toll=yes and fee=yes are used on elements where people pay to use that very same element (the service you buy is usage of the road / toilet etc where you apply these tags)
It is probably even a bit more nuanced than that. A sign reading “customer parking only” certainly indicates access=customers on the amenity=parking object, but in the case of a shop just an interest in browsing their wares and potentially buying something is enough to be considered a customer. It’s not like you must commit to buying something before being allowed to park. Being a customer is correlated with paying for something, but it’s not exactly the same thing as paying an entrance fee. Sometimes the two concepts overlap. Sometimes they don’t.
