try Murmansk as an example for that

added to list of test locations

I love the z10 z11 residential road change. I’d like to keep them in z12 for the moment.

I tested this idea, more about it in the next diary entry.

Maybe you can make highway=residential a little bit thinner and make them distiguishible from the highway=unclassified, which is part of the “grid” and should be rendered a little bit thicker, especially in z14.

Interesting idea, I will test it.

I wouldn’t rule out dealing with it in SQL

Or directly in rendering rules as it is currently done for bridleway and cycleway. The more complicated part is deciding what highway=path really represents.

motorroad=yes

This tag is not used in rendering and without database re-import it is impossible to use it.

what is the impact of narrowing streets on street names ?

It is not blocking rendering names, names are more likely to not fit inside roads.

Can you try to make the residential color lighter on higher zoom level ?

“residential color” - is it about residential roads or is it about residential landuse?

I would also like to see a difference in rendering between high usage paths/footways and low usage paths/footways.

That would be great - as sometimes adding more data to OSM reduces quality of maps. On z14 displaying only important footways would be result in a better map.

Unfortunately there is no tagging scheme for that what makes such rendering impossible. I was experimenting with one and my conclusion was that it is too subjective.

I have been using footway for the high usage ones, path for the low usage ones (as good a reason as any for the difference between these tags).

Unfortunately it seems that different people use path/footway based on different criteria making the distinction unusable (the same as with landuse=forest/natural=wood).

lighten the forest and wood area and darken the green motorways

It is not so easy - this would start problems with forest too close to other green landuses. It also would not solve problem with motorways looking like rivers.

pedestrian as smaller red ways with red polka-dot filling as with pedestrian areas

I am pretty sure that polka-dot filling would be too busy, but I experimented with footways closer to highway=pedestrian in style. It would be a good idea to at least try highway=pedestrian closer to footways.

Paths are (…) Footways are (…)

Note that according to current definition on OSM wiki highway=path/footway is not indicating surface quality and whatever it is paved. Recommended tagging for combined footway and cycleway is [highway=path; bicycle=designated; foot=designated; segregated=yes/no]

For example this would be [highway=path; bicycle=designated; foot=designated; segregated=yes]

“Main problem with that styling is that it works really well on some maps” should be “This styling works really well on some maps, but not for openstreetmap-carto.”

(is it possible to edit comments?)

I really don’t like any of the highway=footway proposals

It seems to be consensus.

what about the path rendering? Will it be modified or remain the same?

For now I will revert it to current version (black dashes, red dots) and think more about it later.

much better start point for the footways rendering

Making footway like current highway=path but stronger would make it too close to highway=track

It’s the British cartographic standard

Thanks for information!

Blue is a common colour worldwide for motorway signage, hence the use in maps.

Maybe it is worldwide standard for motorway signage but it certainly is not a worldwide standard for marking motorways on maps.

Examples

Thanks, it will be useful!

relatively subtle variation in red, possibly simply a distinct centerline color as in the german style

That is my current plan, hopefully people will like it more than new footways :)

UK styling

Main problem with that styling is that it works really well on some maps. On https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/shop/custom-made-maps.html it is possible to see previews of maps with a really great styling.

See for example

and compare with osm.org/#map=16/50.8100/-1.0946

Ordnance survey is using different strong color for each road type. Note that usage of saturated colors is restricted for that purpose.

OSM map is currently trying to use broad range of colors for multiple purposes, not only for roads. The most obvious are different landuses displayed as areas with various colors - not only as labels. There are also many additional features (for example pitches, parkings, labels for motorway junctions…).

Currently leads to problems like “ops, trunk road through forest is invisible” and result is sometimes closer to abstract art than to an useful map.

One solution is to no longer display so many features differently - for example stop rendering most landuses as areas.

Other solution is to not use not so broad range of colours for different features - for example starting for roads.

In addition OSM map generation is fully automated what makes good label placement and things like box listing ferries extremely complicated (in theory doable, in practise…). Note also that many map styles strongly benefit from fact that one style is not supposed to work across the entire world.

Is switching from blue motorways necessary?

Switching from blue motorways was one of main reasons why I thought about redesigning roads :)

It is probably a bit of cultural effect - I never encountered map with blue used for roads before OSM. From start I keep confusing motorways with rivers. My the first reaction to osm.org/#map=12/50.0554/19.9395 was “why river is so badly mapped?”.

It is not just me, it is reaction of also some other people on showing them OSM for the first time.

I hope that red - orange - white color scheme will be more universal that UK Ordnance styling.

lose a color which currently doesn’t conflict.

It conflicts with water - some time ago I attempted to experiment with water rendering and blue motorway blocked attempts to change.

You seem to have narrowed the roads at z=15/16 but not at 13/14 - this looks good on Malmö but as you know less so at lower latitudes.

Yes, narrowing of roads was mostly done during preparing rendering for z16 and I plan to experiment with widths a bit more. Can you give example of well mapped city/town at low latitude for testing? Most of what I found had really high road density and also benefited from less wide roads.

none of your examples above currently distinguish motorways from trunk roads sufficiently

Currently both are rendered in exactly the same style. I thought that it would be a good idea to reduce number of road classes with a separate style (like Humanitarian style did) but it seems that this idea is not liked.

If you go to change rendering of trams, you should also have a look at rendering of light rails (railway=light_rail)

Is it basically a tram equivalent? From description on OSM wiki it seems indistinguishable from railway=tram and it seems to be result of the different local name for trams. For example wikipedia article has “a mode of transit service (also called streetcar, tramway, or trolley)” quote.

Currently railway=light_rail, railway=funicular, railway_narrow_gauge are rendered in the same style. Maybe it would make sense to render railway=light_rail rather like railway=tram.

I have come to terms with the red junction labels but i still prefer the blue oneway arrrows for some reason. (…) Trams look good as well now IMO. (…) As for the footways

Thanks for feedback!

I agree with your decision on rendering trams only at zoom 12+

Thanks!

Very interesting map, though there is situation where it gives a false positive:

• there is a way that is oneway (oneway=yes) but not for bicycle (oneway:bicycle=no)

• turning left into this way is forbidden, also for bicycles

This tool claims that relation has a problem ““to” member 242368428 forbids to enter oneway in wrong direction”

See relation/3835134 http://map.comlu.com/?zoom=19&lat=50.061017&lon=19.944498&layer=Grayscale&overlays=TTT

One of the major shortcomings of the standard style (and any online maps I’ve seen), is the lack of surface visualization.

Than I have a god information for you - GSoC project mentioned in the first paragraph includes displaying surface tags for roads in Default map style.

1) Update JOSM 2) report a bug to JOSM bugtracker (see instructions at http://josm.openstreetmap.de/newticket)

Look at the continents of Africa and Australia .. you don’t see much zoomed out. For those places rendering highways of less significance would be beneficial when zoomed out.

Can you link a well mapped area with such low feature density? It would be really useful.

Also Google in general draws roads thinner than the OSM standard style (except for the highest zoom levels where OSM draws them thinner than reality). This helps them avoid things like http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#14/4.6211/-74.1845&num=2&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google-map

Thanks for a link! I had example of this problem but not so extreme. Added to list of locations for tests.

For what it’s worth, except for the terrible tree coloured highways, openstreetmap-carto is great for mountainous areas, for example: http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#14/48.7743/-121.8236&num=2&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google-map

It is hard to compare map styles here as Google Map style has nearly no data to display. Also added to list of locations for tests.

drawing width depend on local map scale

That would interesting, but it may result in not-so good display on border between one width and another. I will add it to “list of wanted things that would be nice” - osm.wiki/w/index.php?title=Google_Summer_of_Code/2015/AcceptedProjects/Road_style_in_Default_OSM_map_style&diff=1175116&oldid=1174627

make the smaller ones less visible, since in cities, most of the roads tend to be residential/service roads, where as in a rural area most of the roads have a more significant classification.

Hopefully this will work (it worked in Google maps but they have a different dataset, with closer amount of roads marked as trunk/primary importance for country. In OSM differences are more significant - compare UK and central or eastern Europe. The same may be true also for roads of lower importance)

Humanitarian style: it looks less polluted and more pleasing to see.

Comparison with this map style is also planned.

Unfortunately, the above breaks down for non-motorized “highways”. There is currently no good way to designate if a highway=path is a major-trail/walkway, or if it just a small off-shoot.

Yeah, and importace of footway is not something that would be easy to tag (smoothness is nearly too subjective to tag it). Minor footway may be a route of important trail/cycleway/etc route. But unfortunately route relations are not working as a reliable hint for importance.

Why is Polish capital city name not rendered?! (…) You are now looking at the whole Europe and it displays the names of province

My current project is limited to roads. But as minimum, during GSoC I must figure out how to test low zoom levels (hopefully downloading planet data and filtering it using osmfilter to display only used objects will work). I want to improve it - despite recent improvements it is still really bad (note that simply displaying subnational entities later would make map worse in for example USA where label for states should appear early).

The question is, what is the purpose of the default map style?

See https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/blob/master/CARTOGRAPHY.md

We can probably look to it as an inspiration for certain design decisions, but that’s it.

That is the exactly what I am doing.

Default OSM map style sucks so much visually that if you manage to improve anything then your project will be a success.

Within last versions there were some nice improvements - especially “rendering country/state labels” and “French-style tree rendering” by math1985 and lighter buildings colour by Paul Norman. For me also rendering parking and gate icons later and with lower priority was important but it was important only in heavily mapped areas. But yes, there are still many things that may be improved.

so users can deselect items they don’t want to see on the map

Not planned as part of this GSoC project, it would be a really complex project beyond improving a map style.

There appears to be a residential area darkening going from z13 to z12

landuse=residential is displayed in the same colour, it is most likely optical illusion relating to change how minor roads are rendered

Change the style based on highway= node density for the current tile.

The rendering at various zoom levels should take into account the density that results on the screen

As mentioned: obvious solution - render features differently in low density areas is really hard and doing this is not planned as part of this GSoC project.

And obvious, simple solutions like that one have drawbacks worse than current “single style for everything”.

Is it even possible to change license without throwing away massive amount of data?

Thanks for your icon set!

I want to thank you for the overpass turbo. It is really amazing tool allowing to quickly find missing/bad data (I am using it to find nearby roads without surface tags).

It is possible to make simple but powerful visualizations, yesterday one was used by a local portal (I quickly made a map of places with playgrounds to illustrate that city center has none - http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/8FY ).

Thanks for this amazing tool!

You may want to change “where” to “were” in “Most of the POI in Ankara where added in 2006 - 2008”.

Please, switch to something less jarring. Maybe jist listing pages or category would be enough? This banner is rather obnoxious.

Can I request this for Kraków?

lower-top corner: osm.org/?mlat=50.1309&mlon=19.7754#map=11/50.1309/19.7754

bottom-right: osm.org/?mlat=49.9850&mlon=20.1153#map=11/49.9850/20.1153

or larger