Tag:service=driveway
 service = driveway
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Specifies that a road is a driveway, typically leading to a residence or business. 
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| Rendering in OSM Carto |
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| Group: highways |
| Used on these elements |
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| Requires |
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| Status: de facto |
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A driveway is a minor service road leading to a specific property. It typically branches from a bigger road and leads toward an entrance to a specific destination (building, etc.).[1] It may end at or pass the entrance, but either way, it gets close to its destination. It is rare for a driveway to be the way to access another roadway (but see Pipestems below).
Note that driveways are defined by their function, not their quality. Driveways may have various qualities – e.g. from surface=asphalt through surface=compacted to surface=sand.
A driveway typically leads to a residential home or commercial building, but may lead also to a research institute, court, military installation, construction site or an abandoned property.
NB See also Pipestem section below.
Usage
Use this tag on ways in conjunction with highway=service on a driveway, especially in any of the following scenarios:
- Primarily provides direct access to a house, garage, or carport; a small number of parking spots may be available for occupants.
- Primarily provides space for picking up and dropping off passengers – also use
covered=yesif it passes under a porte-cochère. - Leads to a loading dock (
amenity=loading_dock) or dumpster (amenity=waste_disposal), potentially from a parking lot – however,service=alleymay be more appropriate in some cases.
There is no defined default access tag for driveways, so data consumers have to guess if you do not add an access tag. Add access=private, access=permissive, access=customers etc. as appropriate.
When not to use the service=driveway tag:
- Paths in or around a parking lot (
amenity=parking) are tagged withhighway=servicewithoutservice=*on the entrance and exit ways, as well as any way that forms the "trunk" or perimeter of the lot, connecting multiple parking aisles (service=parking_aisle). - A drive-through for picking up or dropping off goods – use
service=drive-through.
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A driveway may dead-end at a house … -
… or lead to a two-car garage -
… or to a loading dock -
Some driveways may be really long -
A driveway may be covered by a porte-cochère -
A driveway may branch off from a parking lot and lead right back to it -
Non-residential driveways are often one-ways -
Driveways may be unpaved
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Pipestems
A pipestem or shared driveway leads away from a main road toward several houses, each with their own shorter driveways. Pipestems are common in rural areas and planned suburban residential developments in the United States. Maintenance of the pipestem is typically the joint responsibility of all the homeowners of that particular pipestem. Pipestems may be named, but historically they have typically been unnamed. As of 2019, most pipestems are simply tagged highway=service with no service=* tag. However, some mappers tag pipestems explicitly, either using service=driveway + driveway=pipestem or service=pipestem. As of 2024, there is no preset for either tagging scheme in iD yet [1], but both are supported in OSM Carto, which renders them as regular service ways. While it is not yet clear which tagging scheme is better, adding an explicit value for service=* allows distinguishing this type of service way from other types.
Software support
Many renderers depict highway=service service=driveway with a thinner line than a bare highway=service. Some routers apply an extra penalty to service=driveway so that a route is unlikely to use a driveway to access a non-driveway road, such as a service=parking_aisle. This is because, in many regions, driveways are more or less considered to be intended for destination traffic only, even if there is no legal restriction to that effect.