Hi Greg.
Those are valid concerns.
I don't know how this works in other countries. The way it works here is
that the road owner contracts someone to do stuff, that is, to actually
go out and put down asphalt, cut vegetation, sweep debris, clear snow,
fix signage, etc. The road owner can split these contracts between
different contractors. To ensure some level of continuity and
consistency, the road owner is still the single point of contact for the
public. The public doesn't know and doesn't care who the contractors are.
So in this sense, you could say if the county owns a road, the county is
in principle both the owner and the operator, and as the operator the
county has contracted operational tasks to someone else. In this case we
can safely assume that the owner and operator are the same entity. This
wasn't historically true in Norway -- there was a ten-year period during
which the counties owned the roads, but the state's road authority was
the operator of those roads. This was in contrast to municipal roads,
where the municipality was always both owner and operator.
If we look at this from a data perspective, the most important
information for us to capture /today/ is which public entity type owns
the road and put this in the ownership tag. The specific entity can be
derived geographically with probably 100% accuracy. If we have the
specific entity available in a data set, we can put this in the owner
tag. If the operator at some point in the future again diverges from the
owner (like with the county roads), we can put that in operator.
Sound good?
Jens
On 13.04.2023 12:42, Greg Troxel wrote:
Jens Glad Balchen via Tagging<tagging@openstreetmap.org> writes:
That does seem to capture it when used on roads. I see it's mostly
used for private roads. Is this tag use undisputed if used with
national/state/county/municipal? E.g. do people object to it being
redudant?
You said you didn't like operator, and I suggest stepping back and
considering the world and multiple possible data consumers, not just the
ones currently on the table.
operator= as I understand it should name the entity that is performing
whatever operations make sense for the object. For a road, that's road
maintenance, snowplowing, debris removal. operator should in my view
actually name an entity, not say "county".
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:owner seems to be what you are
looking for, to denote ownership.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that the owner is the
operator. That's likely often true. But if you want to report issues,
that should go to the operator, not the owner.
You also seem to be looking for "national/state" type key which would
not contain the actual owner, but instead need processing by finding an
admin boundary and then a lookup table. I'm not sure what's best but I
think we should realize that we are talking about denormalization of the
db vs not and that both approaches have issues.
In my part of the US, the situation is:
For most roads, the land is not actually owned by the government (even
though almost nobody understands this). For some I'm sure it is.
Usually there is an easement for the road.
The government would own the pavement placed on the land :-)
operation/maintenance would be done by a state, county, or
municipality (admin_level 4/6/8, normally).
In Massachusetts, Interstate highways are maintained by the state
government, specifically the agency "MassDOT".
Most local roads are maintained by cities/towns.
Some roads are designated and signed "state highway" and are
maintained by MassDOT. Some "numbered state highway" are also "state
highway" and MaasDOT-maintained and some are not so designated, and
thus maintained by the Town. Actually it is section by section. Many
people are unclear on this.
There are "private ways" that are much like "public ways" execpt that
sometimes the town maintains them and sometimes the town does not. A
town might do snow removal and debris removal but not pavement
maintenance on a particular one.
There are places you can drive which are not even private ways, such
as service roads at shopping centers, and residential driveways.
These are maintained by the property owners.
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