How to handle long-term road blocks?

Hello, I’ve just began editing, and I have my first question. There are a couple roads in the areas I’m working on (in the US, generated by TIGER) that have been blocked off. These road blocks are not for temporary construction, but long-term (likely permanent) barricades, making the road undrivable. How should I handle this? My first guess would be to split the road in two where the block occurs, and tag the undrivable portion “highway:service”. Is this the best way? Mostly I’m concerned about navigation software using OSM and misdirecting travelers. Thanks!

highway=service means a service road for vehicle access e.g. dilivery access to shops. So it’s not the right tag to use. You can drive down a service road.

There is a Proposed_features/barriers, if it’s that kind of blockage you’re talking about. I suspect that’s the closest thing we have to a ‘correct’ way of tagging this.

To be honest though, I tend to make short section of highway=footway where there is some blockage for vehicles. Maybe not the most semantically sensible way of tagging, but it works (in renderers and routers). A row of bollards is pretty common on the ends of residential roads in London (where they used to be connected to a main road), so usually make this a diddy little footpath connection to the main road, and I try to remember to add a cycle=yes, since bikes route their way past such things. …and I whack a note=bollards on there for good measure.

Thank you for that suggestion.

One thing I’d like to know is how much should I bother editing until a standard set of tags are defined? I’d hate to think I go through and tag thousands of nodes and ways, to find out half the edits don’t fit the (I’m assuming inevitable) future standard. Of course, it’s obvious this impediment hasn’t stopped the progress of OSM.

I try to do a note=“I user these tags because” explanation on some of my edits, I try to do this because I think the fact is that standards almost never holds and are always implemented differently so if I make mistakes it’s going to be possible to at least understand why I made them…

So just tag and ask questions I’m apparently tagging highway=service wrong, I’ve been using it for streets that are not really made for other things than delivery, parking, streets to private yards, streets that lead no where important and have no name.

(that first paragraph is a long version of a motto I have)