Design challenge: how to render old urban streets

[jeffreyameyer]

Style change requested

Describe what you want to see added or modified in the style. Is it something easy to explain like a color fill or rendering something not currently showing? Or is it a more complex need specific to historical mapping?

If you're asking for new symbology, especially for historical points of interest or areas that might not be part of modern maps, are there existing cartographic symbols or standards we can reference? The more info you can provide here the better!

Example: Old Boston, based on an early 1900s map of Boston in 1676.

Here is the map: https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=1737&img_step=1&mode=zoomify#page1

And a detail:

Here it is (work in progress) in OHM: https://www.openhistoricalmap.org/#map=14/42.3645/-71.0445&layers=O&date=1684&daterange=1400,2021

Zoom 14:

Zoom 16: blank [will file separate ticket]

Zoom 18:

I think we may be basing too much of our design thinking about road rendering on OSM's overzealous street- and road-tagging conventions and modern web mapping's overemphasis on road mapping. For example, It's totally unclear to me that OSM's map of this area really needs 6 different colors of roads, not counting paths, ferrylines, and other oddities..

On top of it all, OSM requires tagging of clearly urban commerical roads as "residential" in downtown Beantown. Crazy.

I'd like to propose the following guidelines and see what we come up with:

• A model for old city streets that involves a new tagging system for urban roads and less on OSM weirdness

• We should design the renderings first and then figure out the tagging second

• We lighten up our current approach, perhaps making the roads lighter rather than darker and enabling landuse to stand out more than the roads, with very fine casings, like the 1676 map shown

• That we de-emphasize road rendering (e.g. why are all the small white roads rendered at Zoom 8 here? I think people know / assume there are roads there that will be revealed at higher zooms + the roads distract from natural features and urban development https://www.google.com/maps/place/Boston,+MA/@42.3563989,-71.3935932,8z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x89e3652d0d3d311b:0x787cbf240162e8a0!8m2!3d42.3600825!4d-71.0588801

• Maybe (maybe) we visually differentiate gravel from cinders from cobblestones from paving stones, but only at the highest level zoom - z=20.... maybe

• I believe the bigger differentiation at higher zooms should just be on width - see the alleys vs. slightly larger roads vs. backbone urban roads.

[Rioscac]

re: road colors Perhaps tune down the opacity of major roads and have thinner curbs for minor roads?

[tsinn]

1. Shifting roads to grays and whites, away from orange and red. Single gray lines when zoomed out transform to white lines with gray cases as you zoom in.
2. Motorway, primary, secondary, tertiary, and residential roads are now differentiated by slight differences in widths instead of colors.
3. Zoom widths now change exponentially instead of by linear steps. Helps with consistency across layers and this functionality is closer to reality - what we might see when zooming in on a satellite image.
4. Rearranged drawing order of different types of transportation lines. Now generally follows this layering: tunnels under rail, under road cases, under roads, under bridges.
5. Cap and join for lines are now set to round.

London, z14:

[vknoppkewetzel]

I think this was addressed in updates, we can re-open if discussion required again