Advice on tagging roads in OSM

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Hello All,

I’m plodding away towards a lovely 100% in Folkestone and Hythe, England - CityStrides and I’ve about 90 streets to get, meaning I’m having to focus on those that I passed by for one reason or another. I’ve also got the occasional solitary red blob in the middle of nowhere that I missed first time round that haunt my sleep!
Anyway, before I throw myself into editing OSM (as a complete bumbling amateur) I thought I’d query a few things with my esteemed fellow striders before getting myself in trouble for labelling Heathrow airport as a bridleway or some such calamity.

Up the road from me is the Channel Tunnel terminal which obviously is private property but continually has red blobs appearing in it:

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One such road - Over Bridge 1 - CityStrides

I did change the whole road in OSM a while ago to Private but got told off by an editor who explained I shouldn’t do that because it prevents navigation software from routing through those roads; I’d effectively cut England off from France via the tunnel…oops. :wink:

What would be the best label for these roads do you think? They are on private property and you need a ticket to drive through but I’m not sure you’d be allowed to walk any of these roads either? Is the ‘access-customers’ the one to use?

Similarly, I have an army firing range not too far away that has a named road running across it: Ferguson Road - CityStrides

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I guess ‘access-private’ for this one?

Last one - there are several country lanes that are unquestionably public roads but have no pavement to walk/run along and I feel are going to be too dangerous to complete safely because of the speed of traffic using them.

For instance - Elham Valley Road - CityStrides

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This is actually a bus route as well and they fill the road from hedgerow to hedgerow!

I’ve tried to find a route into the nearby fields which occasionally works when I can stay close enough to the road. I’ve also tried having an early morning start but end up startling drivers who are not expecting some weirdo to be there!

I don’t feel I can tag these as ‘access foot-no’ because, depending on your attitude to risk, you may feel you could sprint up there one night - you do you, buddy! :kissing_heart:

I know I can always mark them as manually complete, but I’ve been loathe to do that up to this point, but maybe that is the safe option - for me anyway.

I’d be interested on your thoughts on this lot.

Cheers, Graham

<Graham King - CityStrides

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I’d recommend looking over CityStrides Street Query - Google Sheets to see if there’s a compatible tag … or if you can suggest another tag to filter on based on what you see in OSM for these streets.

I notice that I have a ['access' !~ 'customers'] filter but that Way: ‪Over Bridge 1‬ (‪22576290‬) | OpenStreetMap has a foot=customers tag. Based on Key:foot - OpenStreetMap Wiki I would recommend changing that foot to access.

For Ferguson Road, I notice that a section of it - Way: ‪Ferguson Road‬ (‪881710415‬) | OpenStreetMap - is tagged access=private, so that would make me think your edit of doing the same to the other section is ok.

:flushed: Way: ‪Elham Valley Road‬ (‪32425900‬) | OpenStreetMap (the street you shared a photo of) has a 60mph speed limit?! :rofl: :sob:

Overall, it’s important to listen to feedback on our edits. Our use of OSM for CityStrides comes secondary to the larger OSM community. Some of these situations might end up needing to be corrected in the way that CityStrides queries OSM data, rather than adjusting tags in OSM.

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Hmm, interesting to read the history for this way… Way History: ‪Over Bridge 1‬ (‪22576290‬) | OpenStreetMap

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Thanks for the reply James/Hans, I’ll have a play with this at the weekend when I’ve a mo.

Yep, 60mph national speed limit! Once outside of built-up areas I think they take the attitude that you can do what you want; if you think you can safely rattle along this country lane at sixty, knock yourself out! Until you meet a tractor… :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

Hans - I didn’t realise there was a history for changes made to OSM. And embarrassingly enough a couple of those entries are mine! That was when I’d got two accounts running on Citystrides (UncleMarmite & Krasha) and thought I was being tailed by a stealth ninja every time I went out when it was me all along. :crazy_face:

Oh, I think it was ‘szjozsef’ who told me off! :confused:

James - when you say to change ‘foot’ to ‘access’…not sure I follow? Do you mean change ‘access - customers’? Or would that trigger my mate, szjozsef?

But back to the high speed country lane - would anyone change the tag or should I suck it up and mark as manually complete? Whaddya think? :nerd_face:

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Regarding Over Bridge 1 - I see a couple of alternatives. The general access Permissive means that it’s included in CS. After that the query looks at Foot, and only if that’s No it will be excluded. But since general access Customers is excluded, I think Jim could also explicitly exclude foot=customers. Then this one would go away.
Another option would be as szjzsef mentioned, that the road could be tagged toll=yes, that would also make it excluded.
Regarding your country lane, that’s tricky. There seems to be a tag foot=discouraged, but it doesn’t seem to be used much. I don’t know if that would be frowned upon by OSM experts. Or use foot=no, I mean it doesn’t seem to be used on foot. A foot=no tag doesn’t mean somebody couldn’t run it anyway if you wanted… I have run som foot=no in the early Sunday morning just to get rid of that annoying white line in my LifeMap :slight_smile:

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I was suggesting that you change the tag from foot=customers to access=customers … in other words, changing the key of foot to access. I don’t think anyone would have issues with this, because the Wiki entry for foot does not include any mention of a value of “customers” whereas the Wiki entry for access does.

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Question is if access=customers will allow routing the same way as permissive for vehicles? But now I found this, Tag:access=customers - OpenStreetMap Wiki. Where the last part about ferry services seem relevant here

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Afternoon,

Might have a session trying to edit OSM this afternoon based on your feedback so if the evening news is full of reports of chaos on the roads because GPS satellites have dropped out of the sky I’m be blaming it all on you lot. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: :kissing_heart:

Seriously, thanks for the advice and I’m pretty sure I’ll be back for more.

Cheers. :+1:

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