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A Shortbread map style that looks a bit less beige

@Zverik OK, fixed. https://map.atownsend.org.uk/vector/index_osmf_shortbread.html#17.59/59.389977/24.717497 looks more sensible now. There are a couple of other bugfixes that could do with merging into this style too; I’ll do that as time permits in the coming days.

A Shortbread map style that looks a bit less beige

That’s a https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=living_street not in a residential area - I definitely need to look at that. I think all my examples were in residential areas, like https://map.atownsend.org.uk/vector/index_svwd03.html#17.59/54.551428/-1.904913 . The “draw living streets without casing” thing was supposed to be a way of distinguishing them from other streets, but obviously that does not work here.

In the style that I used the cartography from I eventually changed that (see https://map.atownsend.org.uk/vector/index_svwd01.html#17.59/54.551428/-1.904913 ) so it should just be a case of merging that change into this style too.

Rearranging the world around Nominatim for fun and profit

Obviously me using traditional counties in the example above is a bit of a joke, but some people do seem to take it seriously. I was in this pub earlier today, and the landlady was very insistent that it was in Yorkshire not anywhere else. She’d agree with my joke server about the county:

https://h20.atownsend.org.uk/nominatim/search?q=53.538625,-2.013794
"5, Chew Valley Road, Saddleworth, Greenfield, Oldham, Yorkshire, England, OL3 7JZ, United Kingdom"

although it’s chosen the street name from the back door rather than the front.

Further up the road the museum has this sign on the wall:

Saddleworth Museum and Art Gallery west wall

so it’s not just her!

Why is showing pedestrian crossings so complicated?

@kumakyoo You can see the code I’m using at https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-style/blob/master/shared_lua.lua#L7373 , but answering your questions:

Lowered kerbs? Tactil paving? Island? Is one of that enough to qualify a place for a crossing

Yes, I’ll show any of those as a https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=crossing.

And what, if a lot of people cross at that place, but there is nothing visible on the ground? Does this still qualify as a crossing?

No, without infrastructure that wouldn’t.

or working pedestrian routing you need crossings at every place

Yes - that’s exactly the point I’ve made at various places in https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/separate-sidewalks-or-not-near-ealing/132613 and similar threads.

If one maps a crossing, the main tag ‘highway=crossing’ should always be added.

I believe that it makes sense to do that too, although there are edge cases where some other highway tag makes sense.

Léarscáil 2025

I bet you could search for “common Irish words” to identify some of them, for example this overpass query searches for “Bóthar” in name when there is no name:ga. That won’t work for everything (for example this, which I spotted just by looking for mixed language use in a gaeltacht).

Léarscáil 2025

What about things that have Irish names only, like this road? That just shows as this. I presume it’s in a Gaeltacht that far west in Galway, hence name but no name:ga or name:en.

Why is showing pedestrian crossings so complicated?

@cquest Interesting - is there a link to the tags used anywhere?

Rearranging the world around Nominatim for fun and profit

That’s surprisingly accurate :)

Politically motivated vandalism on OpenStreetMap

You need to be a little bit careful with that revert tool - it doesn’t work where there are multiple problem changesets (it actually makes things worse) and if the problem is still ongoing it can also make things worse (as it warns when you run it) due to the way that it queries the data. The Josm reverter is a good option that is interactive; it’ll help you untangle vandal and later good-faith changes. If you want to revert “everything not changed by a later mapper” then the perl revert scripts are a good option, but they require a bit of familiarity with the OSM API and scripts in general. If it looks too complicated just report it to the DWG :)

Politically motivated vandalism on OpenStreetMap

In case anyone (including OSMF DWG team) missed it,

Please email [email protected] with full details of who did what, when, and what the political context was. Without that we won’t even know about it.

– Andy (from the DWG)

Analysing Swarm Intelligence: What's a Highway?

I recently read somewhere that an OSM contributor is waiting for an OSM fork

It’d be interesting to know more about that - what did they actually say?

Towards Creating General Melchett's Map

This diary entry describes me making a series of changes to the mod_tile that was current in 2016 to support raster zoom levels up to 28.

I repeated that in 2022 - that “zoom2022” version supported Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04 and Debian 12.

I’ve repeated it just now in 2025, and the resulting “zoom2025” version supports Debian 13.

The Côte de Blubberhouses and the Pacific Ocean

Unlike you I find the combined names a clever solution to this conundrum, which I note your alternative does not actually address otherwise

Actually, no - based on local knowledge, Kex Gill is the major name here; Nun Ings is just some random name that someone has copied from an old map. Old OS maps are full of these, and unfortunately some people have copied them willy-nilly into OSM.

Have a look at OS OpenMap StreetView for some of these old names (but note there that Kex Gill is the larger one) and at the newer OS OpenMap Local where Nun Ings does not appear at all. The name on the heath is just a made-up one; it only occurs in OSM.

Large and small trees

The vector version is live already - see https://map.atownsend.org.uk/vector/index.html#15.94/52.947792/-1.209111 for the area in the picture above.

That map on that site covers UK and Ireland, but it’d be relatively easy for someone to create a similar map for a different area. The script used to create the map just takes Geofabrik areas as parameters (so here “europe britain-and-ireland”). You could use “europe france” as a parameter in the script to get a similar map for France, and as long as the machine generating the times didn’t run out of memory (there are ways of preventing that) it should “just work”.

I’ve also made similar changes to the raster version of the same map, so “different sized trees” should appear there too.

Large and small trees

3 renderings example: - small tree icon (diam<5) - medium (5<diam<10) - large (diam>10)

Based on the usage that taginfo suggests I’m actually using four sizes - “<=10”, “>10”, “>20” and “>30”. There are enough of the larger two to justify them being there as well; but above 35 some values seem to become silly.

Also have to think about not hiding objects under the trees while rendering

A couple of lines in the style try and do that. One is icon-allow-overlap (and also the way that the tree icon is drawn it’s designed to not look messy when drawn over others), and another is text-optional, which means that the icon will be shown even if there is no room for the text.

What if the OBDL, but explicitly inclusive and antifascist?

It’d be a licence, but not an open one.

Json has such a clause and it isn’t considered an open licence.

Who gets to decide what is “good” and what “not good”? You? Me? Santa?

mbtiles, mbtileserver, tileserver-gl

how to serve my own tile server using the openstreetmap-carto stylesheet

That’s using raster tiles, do do that on you’re laptop I’d suggest installing WSL with either Debian or Ubuntu running there and then follow these instructions. If that isn’t an option but Docker is, try these.

If you want vector tiles then I’d (as mentioned earlier) suggest Tilemaker under WSL and then Apache + mod_mbtiles. This was intended as a “soup to nuts” guide to doing that on Linux, but all but the “obtaining a server” part of that would likely also apply to WSL. You’ll then have to fiddle around with the Windows firewall (but then as a Windows developer you’re presumably used to doing that).

mbtiles, mbtileserver, tileserver-gl

Was there any reason why you chose Windows Server here (other than “it was what you had lying around”)? Windows versions of OSM tools always suffer because basically “no-one developing them uses Windows”.

One thing that you might try include WSL - I’ve not tested that on your particular environment but I’d be surprised if it didn’t work, based on the things that have worked in the past.

Serving vector tiles is basically just “serving a small portion of a big file”. In the past I’ve used Apache on Windows without problems, so one avenue to explore might be that with mod_mbtiles. I haven’t tried that on Windows, but it works fine on Debian Linux.

Roads without key: sidewalk

The check I use for displaying “is there a sidewalk on a road” on maps is https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-vector-extract/blob/main/resources/process-sve01.lua#L1790 .

An example of a map that you can make with that is https://map.atownsend.org.uk/vector/index_svwd08.html#9.34/52.2054/-1.5605 - that only shows primary and secondary roads if you can walk on them. It wouldn’t be that difficult if you wanted to create a set of vector tiles in that schema for California.

About main keys and values

@kumakyoo yes - that mostly makes sense, and assuming that leisure is an area feature and highway a linear one unless there’s an explicit area tag is certainly an approach, but you will find some values for which this isn’t true - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=pedestrian is one example, most closed https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway=pedestrian ways without an area tag are actually areas.