Today looked at changesets calling for review. Found one that tagged a track with motor_vehicle=designated. I asked the person what that means and got told, it means that there’s only agricultural traffic allowed.
Got curious, overpass finds 50 more of those in my province. Mostly tracks, some service. All added by iD users with low CS counts. So I looked at iD:
The tooltip translated: Access envisioned in accordance with local regulations or signs.
Not easy to grasp that either. Does it even make sense? For a motorway e.g? The tag is documented here Key:motor_vehicle - OpenStreetMap Wiki as a red link. If the mentioning there is removed, will it be removed from iD suggestions too?
This value is often used, especially for foot and bicycle. iD simply outputs the most frequently used values regardless of the key, and auto complete for “des” displays designated before destination in alphabetical order.
In my experience, this is often a “mistake” when tagging “residents only.” But it could also be something else here.
Thank you, I know what designated means with foot and bicycle, my question was specifically about the tag motor_vehicle=designated though. The analogy though would make me imagine a blue sign with motor vehicles.
Hmm, I give it a try: This tag says, to know whether you are allowed to drive a car or a motor cycle there, you either have to know the local law or go there and read the signs on location.
A moment before you considered the tag correct on parking spaces especially built for cars in Germany. (Leaving motor cycles and other motor vehicles out of joy though.)
Following the *=designated logic, in Austria on a road it might look like
but I see it tagged where this one is found
Obviously, the editor description matches the second one, if and when there are extra rules to take into account.
I was refering to your suggested interpretation which to me read like it means that we can’t tell the access value from afar which seems useless for an access tag.
I think the only thing everyone I met agrees upon is that access=designated implies access=yes and thus must not be used when a sign forbids access.
Thank you very much, this explanation helps me finally understand after years what “designated” means in the context of “access” in OSM. So, it literally means that the access for that traffic type is marked/signed.
I agree that the iD description confuses it as it makes it sound like “this type of way is generally allowed for this traffic as described in the local laws”, which doesn’t sound like something one would easily map without looking up those traffic laws/regulations.
And the wiki for access=designated also makes its usage not pretty clear, especially with a line like “Designation is usually indicated by signage or markings, but not necessarily.”
Not sure how this applies to your cases, but I have seen this tag used incorrectly for motor_vehicle=destination. Simply due to the similarity of the words designated and destination. On hw=service (and sometimes hw=track), destination-signage is quite common.
Sounds more like motor_vehicle=agricultural in that case. Few roads are designated for motor vehicles, though motor_vehicle=designated is implied for highway=motorway.
The newbie I talked with today certainly not among those.
They chose an option in their editor that literally says, access is governed by local rules and signs on location. YOU may know what that means. How should they? Is it just bad translation? Does the phrasing in English better?
Das ist halt einfach die falsche Interpretation. Der Satz ist zweideutig. Auf Deutsch:
Zugang entsprechend lokaler Vorschriften oder Schilder vorgesehen
Gemeint ist folgendes:
Der Zugang ist vorgesehen - also erlaubt - und ergibt sich aus lokalen Vorschriften oder Schildern.
Deine Interpretation:
Der Zugang entspricht lokalen Vorschriften oder Schildern.
Die zweite Interpretation ist insoweit irrsinnig, dass jeglicher Zugang lokalen Vorschriften und Schildern genüge tun muss. Der Text ist einfach schlecht formuliert. Auch in Englisch.
Access allowed makes it seem like access=yes. It’s rather more like a path with somewhat of a priority for the designated traffic mode.
Maybe “Access allowed with special consideration”. The determination whether there is special consideration is based on signage or local law (if the local law explicitly requires such consideration be made).
Consideration can just be that other traffic modes are excluded.
I was also thinking “amenities”, but that would probably be confusing with amenity=…
If you say “dedicated access”, why isn’t it access=dedicated. I know, history, but that’s still confusing.
The thing is, it’s not designated because of the sign (notwithstanding the syntactic similarity), but because it was defined, that is designated, by the local authority to have this special status where the access mode in question was especially considered during planning to the extent that the result of that consideration is now visible on the ground.
This differentiates it from a basic access=yes which basically just says “It’s not illegal to go there”.
The extent to which formal designation is required is contentious. But that’s the gist of it.
Maybe:
Designated access by signs or local regulation. May be non-exclusive.
Zugang gewidmet durch lokale Vorschriften oder Schilder.
While some of the suggestions in this thread are improvements in general, I’m not sure if they would have prevented the error. It seems that the “missing link” for that mapper was understanding that a sign designating access for a subset of motor vehicles (agricultural) does not qualify for this tag - the sign must designate access for motor vehicles generally. But I’m not sure how to convey that concisely in a tooltip.
