May I try to answer? I went back to the original wiki page of driveway2, which gives some sort of definition (some sort only, because the page also talks about driveway, which is where the whole thing has a flaw, in my view): driveway2 is a catch-all value for all situations that feel like driveway but are excluded by the formal definition of driveway.
The whole point being that this may/might point at ambiguities in current definitions, but does not define a very compelling category.
And I’d like to tell the designer of this value that nobody questions his/her seriousness or dedication to OSM. Just the significance of this attempted new value. Not you; just the value. Maybe you can propose an improved definition for existing values, or a new attempt at a new value, avoiding the various pitfalls this one encountered.
It seems to be a catch-all, but the name appears to be deliberately confusing. Perhaps not a classic trolltag, but a troll-value.
I think we have spent enough time feeding this particular troll.
IIRC service=feeder has been suggested in the past for more “major” service roads, if this or another drop-in value is not considered by most to be a suitable replacement then I’d vote delete it as service=driveway2 clearly doesn’t have enough meaning to be worth keeping.
Given the apparent vagueness of the usage (which is so complex that it must be hidden behind enough obfuscating text that you could paper a wall with it) it is probably trying to cover too much and should really be two or three different concisely defined values. If that’s the case retaining the confusing tagging in the interim isn’t really an advantage as other highway=service without service=* would need to be checked for the new usage too.
I agree that it appears the best definition of “driveway2” appears to be “highway=service where no service=* values are adequate” which leads to the natural conclusion that, in accordance with the rest of the OSM schema, all instances of service=driveway2 should more properly be either service=yes or service=service (or removed, because we don’t really need to just write the word “service” many times to confirm that a road is indeed a generic or ill-defined service road and not just laziness).
I understand the urge to completely and unambiguously classify everything in the world with detailed tags, but at a certain point it’s just busywork. In fact I’d sooner err on the side of removing all cases of service=driveway entirely than continue splitting hairs about different minor paved surfaces.
Unfortunately for anyone in favor of “driveway2,” the OSM database isn’t a reflection of local or personal ways of defining English words, and when a number like 2 is used in a tag key it’s usually assumed to be a way of defining secondary values before the use of semicolons in values was commonplace (like address vs address2 or name vs name2). Even if there was a big need to highly classify driveways, which there isn’t, and even if there was consensus about what the word driveway should mean as distinct from the current meaning in the wiki, which there isn’t, adding a number to the end of an existing tag or value to modify its definition is the worst possible way to accomplish the stated goals.
I vote to either mass remove driveway2 since its utility seems very limited, or mass replace with a different generic value that seems to align with the user’s stated goals without undoing work, like service=yes or service=service.
If you meant addrN scheme, then it was bad example because it has clear use case and can’t be adequately described with semicolons as address tags are not expected to be contain lists of values.
I vote to either mass remove driveway2 since its utility seems very limited, or mass replace with a different generic value
Agree in general, but suggest to replace with service=parking. From what I see [1], [2], driveway2 is for service roads that go around parking lots. For me, that is either service=parking or service=yes (meaning tag deletion).
@JaLooooNzdriveway2 is quite misleading and non-explanatory name and should be replaced with something else. Do you have good use case that can’t be achieved using other service=* tags, primarily with =parking and =driveway? After that we can try figure out better name for this feature.
You’re correct @batyrmastyr , addr2 would be hard to merge into addr with just semicolons, I just mean that its meaning is “second address field compatible with and extending addr on the same element” rather than “another separate type of address with a similar but distinct definition and only one should be used at a time on this element” – we don’t use motorway vs freeway tags for example to accommodate regional naming, and we don’t invent cafe, cafe2, and cafe3 tags to accommodate different variations on the definition of “cafe” (which could be anything from an outdoor coffee shop to an indoor deli to a place where you can make a reservation and pay to pet owls and no food is served, thanks Japan!)
Confusingly, per wiki consensusservice=parking_aisle is intended only for navigable ways inside a parking lot only used to access the parking spaces contained by that way, and not the access ways in/among the parking lot which should be left as plain unspecified service roads. There’s basically a hierarchy inside of large parking lots where service roads let you get in/out/around the lot, and parking aisles are the lowest tier of road only used when trying to actually park. Even a single road with parking spaces used for no other reason than parking wouldn’t be a parking aisle since it would be its own main way in and out of the parking area (itself.)
We agree that the advocate for driveway2 seems to be suggesting that these parking lot access ways should be specified as service=driveway2 instead, as a sort of third tier in between a proper service road and a parking aisle, among other possible uses, but many others including myself are saying that such an arrangement would only add to the confusion and not fix anything, for many reasons already discussed.
A driveway is a minor service road providing access from the highway to an offstreet area used for driving, servicing, parking, or otherwise accommodating motor vehicles. << Mandatory Clause
A driveway is a minor service road leading to a specific property. ← Mandatory Clause
Driveway will typically lead to residence or business but may lead also to research institute, court, military installation, construction site or an abandoned property. ← Mandatory Exclusion Clause (other properties do not apply)
Use this tag on ways in conjunction with highway=service on a driveway, especially in any of the following scenarios: ← Mandatory Clause
Primarily provides direct access to a house, garage, or carport; a small number of parking spots may be available for occupants ← Mandatory Clause that contradicts with first Clause
Primarily provides space for picking up and dropping off passengers – also use covered=yes if it passes under a porte-cochère ← Mandatory Clause
When not to use service=driveway tag: ← Mandatory Exclusion Clause
Paths in or around a parking lot (amenity=parking) are tagged with highway=service without service=* on the entrance and exit ways, as well as any way that forms the “trunk” or perimeter of the lot, connecting multiple parking aisles (service=parking_aisle). ← Mandatory Exclusion Clause with no rational nor basis behind clause, and is not prescriptive
The delibrately confusing part only comes in because there are objections to generalising the service=driveway entry by removing specific problematic clauses. However, both definition (A) and definition (B) are driveways.
@JaLooooNzdriveway2 is quite misleading and non-explanatory name and should be replaced with something else. Do you have good use case that can’t be achieved using other service=* tags, primarily with =parking and =driveway? After that we can try figure out better name for this feature.
What you and a few others are trying to state is that there is objection to two tags having a similar namespace (service=driveway and service=driveway2), but different definitions. I think the proper term for this is naming confusion but disagree that it is misleading / confusing / non-explanatory.
I would just like to highlight the following use cases that there are various gaps that cannot be covered in the existing proposals, which is covered under “Service ways linking to offstreet area”…
Specific examples includes…
Service ways that forms perimeter of parking lot (as per today, it must be left un-tagged as required by service=driveway) ← Definition problem in service=driveway
Service ways leading to parking areas
service=parking can address this case to a certain extent
Offstreet areas that are not covered by service=driveway ← Definition problem in service=driveway that is valid only for selected types of property
i.e. service ways linking to park / recreation area / industrial areas, and any other offstreet areas not in that list.
Service way linking to other service ways or a batch of properties ← Definition problem in service=driveway that is valid for access to ONE property
This is a common occurrence in rural areas whereby the same service road services multiple properties
Service way only for the purpose of driving
i.e. driving school that was also highlighted previously
i.e. tourism / theme park area for driving only
Avoiding highway=service without service=* tag - allow the preceding condition to indicate that service way is not yet classified
Given the apparent vagueness of the usage (which is so complex that it must be hidden behind enough obfuscating text that you could paper a wall with it) it is probably trying to cover too much and should really be two or three different concisely defined values.
The tag is precise if you consider just the sentence definition, ignoring the comparisons which others demanded to know the “difference”. The “obfuscating text” is meant as comparison and contrast to other existing tag definitions, which is not really required if the definition is analysed standalone.
Shared driveways are documented in the wiki as pipestems and have three competing tagging schemes, all more descriptive than driveway2.
What you are attempting to do here is override the generally understood meaning of driveway with one from a niche legal (re)definition in one corner of the United States. How the Californian legislature twists the meaning of a word is not generally useful to a global project and is doubly useless to a project that prefers British English anyway. You have been told this before and a repeated refusal to respect OSM’s longest standing tagging principles comes across as bad faith. Yes, you may say it’s an alternate definition, but in that case we may as well call it service=motorway under a new definition of motorway as “anything a motorised vehicle can fit down”.
driveway
noun[C]
a private area in front of a house or other building onto which you can drive and park your car
…
driveway | American Dictionary
noun [ C ]
a short private road that leads from a street to a person’s house or garage (= building where a car is kept)
driveway
noun
: a private road giving access from a public way to a building on abutting grounds
… First Known Use 1845, in the meaning defined above
Which is a slightly broader definition, but doesn’t really cover service roads whose purpose is to lead to other surface roads.
If we need a point of distinction I’d probably say that per the Cambridge definitions parking on driveways is usually expected, but the service ways to these larger facilities do not (usually) permit parking on them, they lead to parking or other service ways types.
IMO the argument for driveway2 is like passionately arguing that something should be tagged as a duck because of the feathers, webbed feat and general beak shape, while completely ignoring the fact that the animal in question is actually a goose. Arguing about mandatory and optional clauses in a project that doesn’t document things that way is somewhat missing the point.
For specific claim that we should be following specific definition of driveway from specific chapter of a legal document from California, defined there solely for purpose of that specific chapter, and not intended to match general definition of driveway… see one specific section on this topic on OSM Wiki talk page
Also why California? Rather than another definition of driveway from another chapter of another legal document from say Alaska or Poland?
Thanks @InsertUser for this analysis! I ran an overpass query of ways tagged service=driveway2 which are connected to service=driveway to see how often service=driveway2 might be tagged as a pipestem in this way. However, it only pulled up 46 ways that matched this criterion, so it does not seem that this is the predominant usage of this tag.
I would too (as someone who was not following this forever, and thus has not yet entered this-stranger-is-attacking-my-pack-I-must-defend-it mode , so am still open to hear actual reasons for the tag) like to see @JaLooooNz simple explanation (instead of other people guesses) for what is the purpose of service=driveway2?
As far as I can understand from graphs on that wiki, it is supposed to mean “It is highway=service which was surveyed and found to NOT match ANY of other documented service=* tags”.
But that is just my guess, and could be wrong as any other. I’d thus like to hear confirmation, or (short and concise!) definition from @JaLooooNzthemselves (instead of current defensive-mode-grabbing-at-straws mode they seem to currently be operating from; which is actually quite understandable flight-or-fight mode of operation, which I’ll for the moment try not to prejudice against them).
That being said, I actually do see some use for tag having such semantics (as in my guess), as it would help distinguish between:
highway=serviceintentionally not havingservice=* tag, as none of specific ones match – e.g. service road leading to a gas station, or a service road leading to parking aisles (but not being service=parking_aisle itself) etc.
and
highway=service which does not have any service=* tag because it is not (yet) mapped in enough detail (e.g. someone might later micromap better and add service=parking_aisle or service=drive-through etc.)
For example, such distinguishing may allow apps like StreetComplete to ask for service=* details on all highway=service ways which miss service=* tag.
In any case, I agree that service=driveway2 is horribly chosen name and that this at least should be changed. I’d however suggest completely removing it only as a last resort if the actual tag use is not verifiable. Needless to say, @JaLooooNz could help greatly here by confirming if that (bolded above) simple definition of mine is correct interpretation (or if my interpretation is not correct, stating in unambiguous terms what is the actual simple (one sentence) definition of it), thus defining whether renaming or removing that tag is correct way to proceed (keeping it as-is seems quite unlikely, barring appearance of some extraordinary as-of-yet-unshown information).
If that what I’ve described above is indeed its function, it should be service=yes (as others have suggested too); and I’d also suggest adding several more-precise values for popular subgroups (e.g. service=parking_link etc.) to minimize the use of such too-generic service=yes (remember shop=yes?)
Your focus on avoiding dataloss is commendable, but you aren’t the first to propose this approach. Unfortunately, we’ve been trying to get an answer for over two years and don’t seem to be any closer to one, hence what amounts to a pile-on this time. We can continue to run out the clock in hopes of a perfect solution, but all that means in reality is that service=driveway2 will have become a de facto established tag, to everyone else’s dismay.
I would summarize the plea for service=driveway2 as “This is a driveway, too”.
In Nederland, a driveway (“oprit”, “inrit”) has variants.
Most are short private driveways to a single house or garage (“oprit”)
Some are slightly longer driveways eg to the back of a property (“inrit”
Some are much longer, but still lead from the road to a property (house or complex), usually starting with a gate (“oprijlaan”)
Some are shared driveways, servicing multiple properties (“gedeelde inrit”, “gezamenlijke oprijlaan”)
Some shared driveways turn into a private service road giving access to multiple regular driveways. That is when we no longer call it a driveway, but still a (private) service road, even if some access is usually granted.
This service road may be public access: still a service road, but definitely not a driveway.
Some have another exit: then it’s still a service road, because the main function is to give access to the driveways to the properties.
If such a service road gives access to a common parking, we will definitely not call it a driveway. It’s a service road (“dienstweg”) or access road (“toegangsweg”).
Long story short, I think it is fine for the Dutch situation to come up with more specific service=* values for the non-driveway variants of service roads. I don’t think they will gain much usage, but you never know.
I don’t think the value driveway2 will be seen as adequate for these variants of service roads.
BTW Nederland has the concept of “A driveway construction”, which means that a regular street, where it links to another road, has the construction of a driveway entry (sloped, table across sidewalk, different paving) and this has legal value, because traffic on driveways or roads constructed as driveways has to give way to the larger road.
In response to @mnalis but overall I think the topic has surfaced several times in this thread and elsewhere:
For example, such distinguishing may allow apps like StreetComplete to ask for service=* details on all highway=service ways which miss service=* tag.
It is true that a tag that basically means that a highway=service road is none of the service=* values used but “just” a very minor road would be handy for the cited purpose. See also the ticket New Quest: What type of service road is this? (#808) in the app’s issue tracker.
However, the introduction of a presumed service=general that catches all other cases except for the ones currently defined means that no other service=* tag value should be added later, as the introduction of another documented value would mean an implicit redefinition of a presumed service=general.
So, I am not saying that such a tag would be a bad idea, but before such a tag is introduced, we should be really sure that there are no other service road categories for which it would make sense to have a value.
YM such as service=maintenance, for tracks and roads allowing vehicles and crews to access railways, structures, canals, major dykes, masts, wind mills, etc for maintenance.
I hesitate to say this because of the potential downsides, but if we’re unsure of the best categories, could we do a service=described + service:description=((concise note of function))? This could lead to a pool of text that can be easily searched to pull together common uses for tag proposals. Alternately it could just lead to a load of bloat in the database that no one wants to clean up on the basis of it being potentially useful “at some point”.
For generic service roads in things like shopping plazas and business parks that seem to have their own individual hierarchies, we could potentially reuse primary, secondary etc. for these as a way of representing the internal structure without getting too caught up in the minutiae of reflecting the facility type in the service type. I think these are fairly generic terms for ranking, but if having them as service types is too prone to confusion with the highway type then as an alternate major, minor and intermediate might work (not quite in that order).
I like this idea. I’m always finding service roads tagged service=parking_aisle or service=driveway that should just be plain highway=service. Seems like some mappers assume they are supposed to always pick one of the service= values. service=primary would at least let me indicate that no this road really shouldn’t be tagged as a driveway or parking aisle.
service=access_road could be fine, although I don’t think it really adds any meaning beyond highway=service because “service road” and “access road” are synonymous terms. service=primary, service=main, service=major, or similar would communicate that this service road is slightly more important to the network than other service roads (what we currently rely on the lack of a service= tag to mean).
, so am still open to hear actual reasons for the tag) like to see 