Please specify [country] or [city] you can relate to, otherwise such statement might come across as shortsighted. Narrow motorcycle alleys are common all across Asia, and this proposal could help resolve tagging conflicts that have persisted for a decade.
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I missunderstood the proposal. I see why there is a wish to have such tag. I’m not against this proposal in general.
But in there are existing options to tag these kinds of ways. You have to find good arguments why a new tag is really needed.
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Absolutely, it’s an important factor. I am sure that one reason you tag narrow roads as service=alley is to discourage navigation due to their difficulty. However, a signed one-way street without other obstructions doesn’t pose the same navigation challenges and functions similarly to a two-lane, bi-directional road. In medieval or old cities, these one-way streets are often the primary routes.
No worries at all. You made some great points. Readers like you assumed that highway=alleyway would address the service=alley issue in Europe. Maybe it should? Perhaps the current proposal needs a different name?
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There are a new generation of commercial delivery vehicles, especially designed for these situations. I’m aware of one specific example, the Velove Armadillo. Approximately 1-meter wide. The solutions are being designed to fit the problem.
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Parliament Street is a footway and is recorded as such. I recall 0.9m is at its widest end, narrows to about 0.65. I’ve used it often, but never measured it. As a footway, it is illegal to drive motor vehicles or bicycles on it. Other roads that are intended for pedestrian use have signed restrictions limiting vehicular access.
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There are 232 of those around the world - I guess you mean this one in Exeter? 
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A narrow bidirectional street in the suburbs probably presents a far lower risk of obstruction than a narrow unidirectional street in busy city centre, so it depends.
If they are primary routes, they should be highway=unclassified where it is used as a quaternary, highway=tertiary or higher, even if they are narrow, to reflect their function and importance. What exactly they should be depends on what is their role in the local network. service=alley has been used for ways whose function and mobility are lower than highway=residential.
Usually, city administration/government will choose ways with greater carrying capacity for the function of through traffic (arterials, or maybe collectors depending on what exactly you have in mind). I know a few cities in Brazil that ended up with exceptionally narrow arterials due to uncontrolled growth (those cities were not initially planned for growth, and don’t have money to build road rings or new ways to solve their problems), but I don’t remember seeing this in any of the major European cities.
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There are a new generation of commercial delivery vehicles, especially designed for these situations. I’m aware of one specific example, the Velove Armadillo. Approximately 1-meter wide. The solutions are being designed to fit the problem.
there are also existing solutions like slow and narrow caterpillars where you can load stuff on and use them to carry loads up steep and narrow alleys, I know one place where the people share such a vehicle (or pay for it as a service and one person owns it, I have seen it several times but am unsure about the details of payment)
something like this
I think we shouldn’t make highway classification decisions based on rarely used vehicles if we want to achieve a result that is considered both correct and useful by most map users.
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I think in most European cities, alleyways that are too narrow for cars have either been ‘improved’ and widened or demolished or they have been made footways where motor vehicles are not allowed. So in Europe, where many of us map, there isn’t much need for a tag that means “street too narrow for a car”, and that is probably why it’s taken 20 years for someone to propose it.
But OSM is a project with a global scope. Narrow alleys where motorcycles are allowed are not just common in Asia, but also in some North African cities (e.g. the medina of Marrakesh). If a mapper from one of those regions says they’re missing a tag for them, we should listen…
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And then there is the issue that service=alley has two documented meanings that are quite different from one another. Usage (1) is uncontroversial, a service road providing rear access to properties. Usage (2) is more controversial, a narrow urban street that provides access to the front of buildings. Other mappers would just use residential with lanes=1 for this case. A forum poll had a perfect 50:50 split.
It sounds to me like this proposal is a good opportunity to sort this out, by deprecating the second usage? The proposal could say something like:
service=alleyshould no longer be used for narrow streets in historic cities if they provide access to the main entrances of buildings. The tag should be reserved for service roads located between properties to provide access to back gardens, rear entrances, fire exits, and storage areas. To map narrow streets in an urban environment, use eitherhighway=alleywayorhighway=residential, depending on width.
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(3) Another debated use of service=alley started up in this post, specifically for ways too narrow for most 4-wheel vehicles but still legally allowing small motorized ones like motorcycles, rickshaws and micro car. While these pathways are rare in Europe, they’re really common in Asia.
Some people think all motorized ways should be classified based on their main function, regardless of width, while others think this should only apply to motorcars and larger vehicles. There’s no clear consensus on this either.
However, I’m not convinced that (2) and (3) should share the same tag. @dieterdreist initially proposed this with (3) in mind, but I agree that in terms of naming, highway=alleyway fits better to solve (2) as you suggested.
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@ftrebien pointed out in the wiki discussion that the proposal needs to differentiate itself from highway=living_street. If we’re talking about ways shared with pedestrians, wouldn’t that make it fall under living_street? Maybe instead of creating a new tag for use-case (2), we could tweak the existing living_street tag by relaxing some of the strict legal rules.
Here are some sample images from around the world that I think should be included for use-case (3) in the proposal.
They feature narrow alleys in both medieval (Morocco) and modern urban areas (Indonesia), a narrow passage (England?), motorcycle bridges, and underpasses and overpasses (Thailand). While not all of these are technically “alleys,” they are primarily used by small motorized vehicles in urban or built-up environments.
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highway=living_street models street layouts and legal provisions that have essentially nothing to do with a narrow alley. So, “NO”.
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However, I’m not convinced that (2) and (3) should share the same tag. @dieterdreist initially proposed this with (3) in mind, but I agree that in terms of naming,
highway=alleywayfits better to solve (2) as you suggested.
I think 2 and 3 are the same, because ways which aren’t narrow (lanes=1, which means a full sized lane) are highway=residential. I think alleyway is for lanes=0, but I am open to discuss loosening the definition to include narrow streets where a motorcar could barely pass, with no to few lateral space, as it is still a heavy impediment (pedestrians have to step into entrances or press themselves against the walls)
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@ftrebien pointed out in the wiki discussion that the proposal needs to differentiate itself from
highway=living_street. If we’re talking about ways shared with pedestrians, wouldn’t that make it fall underliving_street?
no, living street is a well defined term with many specific rules and has nothing to do with it because it is usually set in areas with lots of space. It means pedestrians have road priority, has implications on speed limit and implies parking restrictions (all referring to Germany, for which the tag was created. In regions where no specific road classes like this exist, meaning of the tag is unclear or whatever locally has been decided and documented).
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These are useful example cases to consider. I still wonder whether we should have 2 distinct main classes of narrow ways (alleyways in settlements as proposed, and “unclassified” narrow roads, e.g. motorcycleway, although this may seem to exclude pedestrians or bicycles in analogy to motorway).
Or have one highway=narrow_road and subtag narrow=alley or narrow=unclassified
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I think a subtag would work better, like how footway=alley or footway=sidewalk is used… because narrow paths can function like a service road (driveway), residential way, or a link (like the overpass example I gave).