Add ownership field
Some presets, such as the highway presets, should have an “Owner Type” field, a combo field tied to the ownership key. This field would complement the existing Operator field and reduce misuse of the Access field. For example, a road signposted as a “Private Drive” but with no legal or signposted access restriction would be tagged ownership=private. Unlike with the owner key, there would be less risk of a mapper overzealously tagging a feature with a private individual’s name.
would it be safe to assume that this field would be most useful tor the minor roads (i.e. residential and service roads like driveways, alleys, parking_aisles, drive-throughs)? Because for all bigger roads ownership would mostly be public, but the exact "owner type" would be hard to deduce on the ground…
FWIW, the usage "in the wild" is quite low: 0.13 of driveways have the ownership tag set, 0.01% of residential roads.