On Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 10:48 AM Paul Allen <pla16...@gmail.com> wrote: > So they're alleys as the wiki describes such things. But not what the US > calls alleys, which are > narrow through ways normally not wide enough for vehicles but are non-private > and accessible > by pedestrians and perhaps bicycles.
What Americans call "alley", as you described, is probably best mapped as highway=footway when narrow [1], highway=pedestrian when wide, or highway=service + service=alley + access=yes [2] when public and allowed for motor vehicles in general. The wiki is written in British English. This kind of confusion could easily be avoided by supplementing the text with a short note on American English. After all, there is nothing in the wiki explicitly saying that it is British English, only "English". We cannot expect all newcomers to figure out it whether it is the British or the American dialect everywhere. This is a problem with other languages that span multiple countries, like Spanish and Portuguese, and I think the solution would be similar. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alley_2.JPG [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elfreth%27s_Alley.JPG -- Fernando Trebien _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
