This concept of public right of ways on private lands has always been a bit weird for me. Obviously the concept in the UK is much different than in North America. The UK concept is obviously based on the fact that many of these public footpaths have been in use much longer than the concept of land ownership and subdivision, whereas in North America, the road network was surveyed and laid out with private lands in the adjoining spaces.
So, the access=private tag is more or less designating that the land is owned by an individual, not a level of government, and the designation=public_footpath designates that the public has been granted access for foot traffic only. Here in North America, access=private would designate that no one is able to access the area without approval from the land owner, and all of the footpaths, roadways, etc are all owned by the various levels of government. There is an interesting twist to this where some roadways are now being built under what is known as a public-private partnership (P3). This means that the land is owned by the government, but a private company builds and maintains the roadway. So, would one tag the road as private, but then add tags to indicate that vehicles are allowed on the roadway? There are a lot of access roads in the foothills of Alberta that are built owned and maintained by various companies. Forestry as well as Oil and Gas companies are the main owners of these roads. Many of them are signed as private roads, and use by the public is at their own peril. Commercial users other than the road owner must obtain permission before using the road. In addition, many of these private roads require commercial users to have radios with specific frequencies available in order to maintain communication on the road, so that heavy truck traffic can be aware of other users travelling the roads. So what the heck do you do with that? Obviously it would be very useful to have all that information available on a map. Being able to determine the owner of the road, and the frequency used on the road of high importance for commercial users, so maps showing that information would be very useful. To be able to create those maps, there would need to be appropriate tags. Would you do something like this: highway=tertiary access=private designation=public_roadway name=Willow Creek Road commercial_use=permissive radio_frequency=163.150 owner=Weyerhauser Canada Here's an online map of an area where this type of mapping detail would be appropriate. http://roaduse.theforestrycorp.com/i/RoadUse/js/public_docs/HWP_Access_June_18_2009.pdf -- James VE6SRV _______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/newbies
