What `service=*` Value for Fuel Pump Aisles at `amenity=fuel`

General talk Tagging general discussion
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In my area, it is very common for Lyft corporate mappers to map service roads of all varieties, including individual aisles for accessing the gas pumps at a gas station (amenity=fuel). At some point in the past, I started following along behind them adding the actual amenity=fuel and other details I could find, including adding service=drive-through to the car wash and convenience store drive-through lane, if present.

I decided that I also wanted to start giving a specific service=* value to the aisles for accessing the gas pumps, and settled on service=drive-through as a well-known tag that was close enough. After all, it is a service road where you drive to a designated spot, make a payment, receive a good, and drive away. The only difference being that at a gas station the customer usually must exit the vehicle and operate the pump, rather than staying in their vehicle the entire time.

Recently a Lyft mapper came back and removed service=drive-through from the pump aisles (changeset). When I asked for their reasoning, they argued (1) that since the customer must exit the vehicle to operate the pump, it does not strictly meet the definition on the wiki. They additionally argued (2) that to leave service=drive-through invites ambiguity and might imply that this gas station offers fueling as a service instead of being purely self service.

I admit I find their second point to be flimsy, as it would be much more reliable to check the amenity=fuel entity itself for the presence of full_service=yes (and to my knowledge this doesn’t exist in my state). But their first point is correct that I was stretching the wiki’s definition a little, but I preferred doing that than trying to find or come up with a new service=* value that isn’t recognized by any data consumers (I do see now that service=fuel is documented, but it only has 200 uses in the US, and only one project claims to support it on taginfo. With the size of some US gas stations, and needing to split most fuel aisles into 3 to tag the covered portion, I expect this amounts to less than 50 gas stations nationwide).

Searching through past forum posts, I see I am not the first person to think of using service=drive-through like this. Multiple of those previous discussions landed on bare highway=service for this use, but I find this unsatisfactory, as fuel pump aisles have a specific and well known use that separates them from other service roads, so we should be able to map that.

So, what do you all think? Is it most acceptable to go forward with:

  1. Use service=drive_through, and update the wiki page to mention this use case as an exception to the “exiting the vehicle” part
  2. Use service=fuel and advocate for more support for it
  3. Don’t use any service=* tag on these ways

PS: shortly after starting to use service=drive-through for fuel pump aisles, I also started using it for the service lanes at shop=car_repair places, under the same argument that you drive the vehicle right up to the service, and then drive it away. If the line is drawn at whether the customer has to exit the vehicle, that line gets muddied a little by the brand of oil change shop, Take 5, which bases their entire brand around service being so fast you stay in your car.

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To encourage more interaction, have a poll

  • use service=drive-through and update the wiki
  • use service=fuel and advocate for more support
  • don’t use any service=* tag
0 voters
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I’ve always just tagged them as driveways

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In everyday language, I wouldn’t call these drive-throughs or driveways. Like you, I’d call them aisles – not parking aisles – or maybe fuel lanes or fuel islands. I think one of those terms would make for an intuitive service=* value, unless we want to come up with something more generic. In general, I’m not too worried about proliferating service=* values, as long as they don’t lead us down the path of bikeshedding over highway classifications writ small.

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First of all, I am not sure how useful the idea below would actually be in light of how OSM is currently being used.
However, I think that, depending on how it is used, it could be quite useful, so I would like to refine some thoughts I have had for a while and put them forward as a suggestion.

For example, I think it could be possible to add different kinds of information along the various routes within a petrol station. There may well be even more diverse use cases in other parts of the world, but even in my area, I can imagine adding information such as taking different routes depending on the type of fuel, choosing different stopping positions depending on the fuel type available at a particular pump, or routes within the petrol station intended to guide vehicles toward the car wash.

Therefore, rather than treating these simply as routes that you just follow, like a generic “drive-through” route, I think it could lead to some interesting and distinctive mapping if there were a way to tag routes that are specific to petrol stations and their particular layouts and usage patterns.

(I am not sure whether OSM will eventually be accurate enough to be used for autonomous driving or navigation, given the potential inaccuracies in OSM data. But if we assume that such uses are possible, I think this could be quite useful information.)

I will leave the development of more advanced ideas to others. :wink:

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If we’d go with service=fuel, would that be for all services at a petrol station or would there also be service=compressed_air, service=water or similar?

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On ways you can pass without ordering/activating some service, using service=drive-through is problematic for routing. You can often drive past petrol pumps to reach some parking lot behind it, whereas having your navigation suggest driving through something like a carwash to reach a parking lot is unacceptable. So service=fuel is clearly better than service=drive-through here already just because it prevents triggering carwash-avoiding behaviour in data consumers.

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Some ideas:

  • Do we really need to add some extra badge to all ways that are tagged with highway=service?
  • One thing is special about the ways next to fuel pumps: They are sometimes blocked by cars (though not in the same way as a carwash or the drive-through lane of a fastfood restaurant). This means that these ways should not be used like any normal way.
  • Tag:service=driveway - OpenStreetMap Wiki seems to be the best available solution: You can use the way to reach a destination that is directly connected to the driveway (here: the fuel pump), but you should avoid using it if that is not the case.
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service=driveway can also cause problematic misunderstanding in data consumers. Fuel station aisles are not similar to driveways from a road user perspective. Traffic can also continue through fuel station aisles, unlike through driveways. Forcefully tricking data consumers into treating fuel station aisles as driveways is a bad idea.

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Need might be overstating it, but it would be nice to be able to distinguish between this type of service road that we know the function of versus one that we haven’t gotten around to classifying yet. It’s similar to the missing tag for parking lot entrances and circulatory roads. That real gap is what famously led one mapper to propose service=driveway2. I see we’re already heading towards driveway 3.0. :wink:

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I think this is incorrect. As I already said, traffic can not always continue through a fuel station aisle. For example, if the aisle is blocked by a car that is being filled up.

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It all depends. Some gas stations have wider aisles able to accommodate three or four cars abreast. Parking aisles are closer in nature to these aisles. Routing-wise, we’re really splitting hairs because routers will go through any of these service types as a last resort, imposing a high penalty. The more important consideration is what we’d call the thing for search purposes, or maybe how a hyperrealistic style or traffic simulator would distinguish it from a driveway or parking aisle.

1 Like
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Looks like we’re trying to associate meanings to service=something that nobody thought about when defining the value. For a normal driveway, it’s all pretty clear and no problem. A typical driveway is anyway a dead end and no navigation system would ever put it on a route, unless it’s the destination. What is the actual information that we want to provide and to whom?

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To me the generalized information that should be conveyed is “this service has a specific purpose which causes people to stop along it.” The result I expect from the information is that routers add a small penalty unless the destination is immediately nearby, and renderers de-emphasize these ways, similar to the way that carto already draws service=driveway/drive-through/parking_aisle

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I think this should be described as “service=drive-through has an implied fee=yes” which does clearly tell us not to use it for fuel pump aisles

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I’ve mapped plenty of drive-throughs that don’t require payment to use the road. In the U.S., suburban banks typically have drive-throughs where someone with an account could deposit without paying a fee. Many post office locations have a dedicated drive-through for a collection box, where you can send an already stamped letter. To me, service=drive-through does imply access=customers, but lots of things can have that access restriction without being drive-throughs.

Simply put, a drive-through is where you conduct a transaction without leaving your vehicle. Often it’s merely a convenient alternative to parking and leaving the car and conducting the same transaction inside.

Maybe one could argue that a fueling lane at a full-service gas station would count as a drive-through, as opposed to at a self-service gas station. In the same vein, we might distinguish between a drive-through for an automatic car wash versus a… something for a self-service car wash that similarly goes through a building. But it’s really splitting hairs at that point. A data consumer is going to learn more from the nearby POI’s tags than anything we put on the service road.

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Yeah, now that’s a global issue. Like in China or Mexico, you don’t leave your car at the gas station either. You drive to the pump, open the tank, someone comes by, fills it, you pay and off you drive. So that would be a service=drive-through according your definition. :wink:

In “high-income-countries” usually you stop, exit the car, fill your tank, pay and off you drive. Maybe service=service_aisle could be a generic term for something like a drive-through where you need to leave the car?

The next question is, whether we want to differentiate those two cases and whether this should be part of the highway, whether you need to exit your car. Though service=drive-through sounds pretty misleading to me in both cases.

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I’ve mapped some full-service stations (the only kind legally allowed in a couple states), as well as some that offer both. Both aisles are physically equivalent and functionally equivalent, if we consider that the primary reason you use a fueling lane is to fuel up, not to get some fresh air. Then again, what’s the functional difference between the parking aisle and drive-through at the same convenience store, where the drive-through goes through the store? Maybe we could distinguish between getting out of the car versus leaving the car – but again, it’s splitting hairs.

To me, common sense says we should distinguish drive-throughs based on a combination of design, function, and access restrictions. In other words: things that are actually called drive-throughs in the real world. If a data consumer needs to conflate fueling aisles with restaurant and car wash drive-throughs, they can simply equate the two tags.

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in Italy, the formal version (full service) is also common, and in big cities, informal service is very common. People standing at the self-service station and filling the tank for a tip. service:informal=yes?

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My feeling is that Key:service - OpenStreetMap Wiki should contain a confidence check that allows a mapper to decide if the value of the key has been chosen correctly.