I’ve just returned from a hiking trip in Italy where we walked part of the Sentiero d’Italia in Puglia. This route follows large parts of the service roads of the Acquedotto pugliese (between Palazzo San Gervasio and Quasano). These roads used to have “proprietà privata” and “accesso vietato” signs (widely ignored…) but are gradually being converted to designated bicycle paths with new surface (usually surface=compacted, smoothness=intermediate). Most are now mapped as highway=track (which I think is wrong, AQP calls them service roads themselves), without access tags.
I’ve updated this way to what I think these ways should typically be tagged like, though some are still under construction and others have not been renovated yet. But because I don’t speak Italian and Italy is not my main area of activity, I’d like to ask someone from the Italian community to take over and update all these ways. I think it’s probably a good idea to contact AQP and ask for an update on the legal access status and state of renovation of their service roads, and update the map based on that and possibly local survey.
Hi and thanks for your contributions first of all,
I noticed in various intersections with main roads where the route passes it’s signaled by signposts, but I haven’t surveyed the whole route yet so I don’t know if that segment you tagged as private is any different (maybe it’s not been completed yet?), as for the parts of the route that have been completed I don’t think they should be tagged with access=private
Because the AQP roads were previously singed as private and are now opened for cyclists, I assume they are still private for motor vehicles. I remember also seeing some signs stating “access only for authorised vehicles” at some intersections. I assume AQP gives this authorisation for its own vehicles as well as for farmers that need to reach their land via AQP roads.It would be best to check these assumptions with AQP directly. By the way much of the conversions are co-financed by the EU so there may be additional sources of information related to this financing from the other partners in this project (I think Regione Puglia is one of them).
access=private sets the default, and then bicycle=designated and foot=yes state the exceptions to this default (bicycle=designated because there are signs showing that cycling is allowed, and foot=yes because I assume that CAI will not route an important trail like the Sentiero d’Italia over a way that is not legally accessible to hikers).
While you’re technically correct, I would be more comfortable starting with motor_vehicle=private. It much better communicates the purpose of the road, at least to fellow mappers.
From Key:access - OpenStreetMap Wiki “The main access=* tag specifies blanket permission for all modes of transport; for example, access=no specifies that nobody may legally access the object. This can be overridden by additional tags specifying mode of transport, e.g. psv=yes indicates that the access is still permitted by public-service vehicles.”
Routing software should know this, and if it doesn’t, it’s bad software and not our problem ;)
I don’t have an issue with interpretation by routers, but by fellow mappers.
The main tags, particularly access, should describe road purpose as closely as possible. highway=service + motor_vehicle=private clearly indicates on first reading that it’s an access road to a private property, where pedestrians and cyclists are probably tolerated (of course, it’s a good idea to explicitly tag that with foot and bicycle).
On the other hand, highway=service + access=no suggests a road in a military base or some other secretive facility. One has to delve deeper into other tags to find that it’s not. To my taste, it’s much of trolltagging for this situation.
We don’t normally tag e.g. motorroads with access=no + motor_vehicle=yes.