Proposal:Safari Service Road
| Safari Service Road | |
|---|---|
| Proposal status: | Canceled (inactive) |
| Proposed by: | PizzaTreeIsland |
| Tagging: | service=safari
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| Applies to: | 
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| Definition: | A type of road, usually inside a safari zoo, where the animals are roaming free and visitors drive through in a car or a bus. |
| Statistics: |
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| Draft started: | 2026-03-20 |
| RFC start: | 2026-03-22 |
This proposal is canceled and replaced by Proposal:Safari Route Relation Type.
Proposal
The proposed tag service=safari, to be used in combination with highway=service, can be used to further specify the type of service road where tourists can either take their own car or attend a bus tour to drive through animal enclosures. Those exist mostly inside safari zoos, however, there are some occurrences where there is not technically a safari zoo organization but dedicated safari roads for touristic purposes still exist. This tag is only meant for roads that are specifically built for this kind of activity, not any road that sometimes gets used by safari tourists.
Rationale
Almost all of the roads where tourists can either drive their own cars or attend a tour bus ride inside safari parks are tagged highway=service. There is, however, no uniform way to further specify the type of service road, although a safari road is somewhat common (124 safari parks at the time of writing this) and the distinction of such a road is clearly defined.
Adding this tag to further specify the highway=service tag has, in my opinion, two major advantages: searchability and the reduction of ambiguity:
Being able to search for these kinds of tourist attractions has an obvious advantage, as well as safari roads being excluded from regular routing. (This should in theory already happen through access tags or the exclusion of service roads for through traffic, but the quality of mapping and also the quality of routing engines varies, so if there is a way to make it more clear, that is a good idea). Of course, tourists planning a visit to a safari zoo will more likely search for the zoo itself rather than for any specific road segment that is part of the route, but there are also safari roads that are not part of safari parks, and having a specific tag for the roads has additional advantages for specialized rendering engines or other external services that specialize in trail planning (like alltrails or komoot).
Having an established and well documented tag for safari roads brings additional advantages: Additional tags like access=*, fee=* or opening_hours=* will more likely be kept consistent and having this tag will resolve the issues of some editors nagging mappers to further specify the type of service road while none of the established values really fit well. I've also seen places where the name=* tag has arguably been misused in a descriptive way to circumvent the issue of the missing safari value.
There is an argument to be made that the service tag values should be kept simple. A clear set of standard values with wide spread use is easy to understand and not overwhelming. The safari value would stand out from values like parking_aisle or driveway as relatively rare. However, I feel like giving a fixed value for this very distinct type of road clears up the ambiguity and over all does more good than harm. There are currently thousands of values for service (granted, a lot of them don't have to do with highway=service), and user defined values are also explicitly mentioned in the wiki.
An alternative way to map these safari tours would be using route relations. In that case, the route type route=safari would make sense. However, none of the examples of parks and other safari tours I looked at on the map use relations, so specifying a further refinement of highway=service instead seems more in place with the established way those routes are currently mapped globally.
Tagging
As usual, the road will be drawn as a way and tagged with highway=service. Additionally, the new tag service=safari will be used. Usually, access=customers will be applicable.
Optional tags might include:
oneway=*fee=*opening_hours=*- Various tags to do with bus lanes
Examples
I added this new tagging to the roads inside Serengetipark Hodenhagen in Germany as well as Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado, US. The latter is a good example of a safari drive that is not part of a touristic safari zoo, which is why we first stumbled upon the necessity of this tag there.
Impact on Data Consumers
Because this proposal does not affect existing tags, data consumers are not impacted. However, there are new opportunities for specialized renderers, travel planing platforms and other 3rd party services, if they decide to implement safari road specific applications.
Features/Pages affected
External discussions
The idea for this proposal started in Note 4330704.
Comments
Please comment on the discussion page.