Removing a road name

If the road exists and has a name, as your gates exist, then it belongs in OpenStreetMap.

Do you expect Google, Bing and other digital imagery providers to excise all evidence of your property because it is a private one? No. Do you expect your government mapping agency not to map you property and that of every other private property> No. Therefore don't expect OpenStreetMap to give you special rights when you don't demand this of other map providers.

I imagine you are concerned that this road being mapped may cause you annoyance as people may drive or walk along it. It is simply necessary to add the tag access=private to the road: then maps and, more importantly, routers will ignore it.

Of course if the name of the road is wrong then it is fine to correct it, or to fine tune where the gate is located. All that you need to do is sign up and click the edit button. You can of course delete the data, but usually people will restore it sooner (in Europe, often within a few minutes) or later (elsewhere), and they might not know it's private. A road which can be seen on aerial imagery which is mapped as private helps everyone.

If you don't fancy editing the data directly you can just place a note (quote box icon bottom right of screen) pointing to the road and add something like "this is private". A more experienced editor will come along and do the edit later (sometimes they like to check from another source that the statement is correct).

• if or if not the road in question is present in OSM doesn't effect your rights to give or not give permission to enter your property so there is not really a reason to be concerned (all this will likely be visible from aerial imagery in any case)
• naturally if the name given to the road is factually wrong it whould be corrected and further the tagging of the road should be such to indicate that it is private property (which is better than deleting it)
• you need to indicate the road in question, best with the name you indicated and a URL from the map page centered on it

SK53, if the road is his property, then Simon absolutely has the right to name it whatever he wants. Just because a government bureaucrat stuck a name on it in a database doesn't make that the 'real' name. I've had a similar problem with a road in my apartment complex; apparently TIGER has a name stuck on it, even though the road actually has no name, AND even though there is another road with the same name a quarter mile away (which is the real road with that name). Basically some bureaucrat was tasked with making sure that the database was complete, and just stuck a name on it because, in the bureaucratic mindset, leaving the name field blank meant it was incomplete--even if leaving it blank was correct. And I have been able to get it out of Google, with a little persistence.

So with that in mind, Wcm33az, you can remove the name in OSM. I would also change the road type to "unclassified" (I assume it's currently "residential"), and add a Note tag to state that it is privately owned and does not have a name, and that the TIGER data is incorrect.