Living Street

As mentioned in Tordanik's link, the US doesn't have any formal legal definition of "living street" as other countries do. I would disagree with Paul Johnson's response there in that I think a standard access road through a residential complex should just be tagged as highway=service because it does not have any special laws to make it friendlier to pedestrians/bicyclists/etc, as living streets seem to.

Side tangent: <soapbox> the wikipedia page lists "complete streets" as the US equivalent of "living streets", but although that idea may share some goals with what I understand living streets to be, the "complete streets" policy is still basically talking about car-dominated roads, only now also considering pedestrians, bicyclists, transit, etc and often carving out part of the road for them. It's not equally sharing that same space with the other modes, which seems to be the idea behind living streets. </soapbox>

Hi Dutchman, no you should not mix ways with buildings, the street tag doesn’t change with the adjoining buildings. The specific tag on the street or way should be accordingly the local agreements in the US. Take a look in the Wiki US tag list for the differences between the ways as, living_street, residential or service and so on. Tordanik has a link in the message and in Europe there several local lists for tagging Streets, please have a look there to.

highway=living_street?