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gravitystorm / openstreetmap-carto

A general-purpose OpenStreetMap mapnik style, in CartoCSS
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Make railways lighter, minor highways less prominent at z8-10 #3538

Closed Tomasz-W closed 4 years ago

Tomasz-W commented 5 years ago

Zoom levels 8, 9 and 10 looks like a unreadable colorful spagetti in some places at the moment:

Examples: https://www.openstreetmap.org//#map=8/49.246/15.430 https://www.openstreetmap.org//#map=9/51.0811/5.8173 https://www.openstreetmap.org//#map=10/50.2498/19.2906 https://www.openstreetmap.org//#map=10/53.5550/-2.0627

Problems to solve:

I believe it could be cleaned similar as z13-14 was in https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/3467.

What do you think about it? Do you see a problem there, too?

matkoniecz commented 5 years ago

On z8 this can be done easily: there are no gray roads, so there is no possible confusion between railways and roads.

My intention was to avoid user thinking that gray lines on z8 are roads (maybe costs of this make it not worth doing, I just wanted to explain reasons for that).

jeisenbe commented 5 years ago

We could also solve this problem by changing the road spectrum, with motorways in violet/purple. Then secondary roads would be yellow-orange and could be displayed in this color instead of gray at z9, and railways could be lighter at z8 and z9 without confusion.

(Secondary can’t be shown as the current yellow at z9 and z10 because the yellow has poor contrast with land-color and farmland) On Sat, Dec 15, 2018 at 5:27 AM Mateusz Konieczny notifications@github.com wrote:

On z8 this can be done easily: there are no gray roads, so there is no possible confusion between railways and roads.

My intention was to avoid user thinking that gray lines on z8 are roads (maybe costs of this make it not worth doing, I just wanted to explain reasons for that).

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Tomasz-W commented 5 years ago

@jeisenbe I'm sure that adding more colours will rather make this mess bigger instead of reduce it.

Adamant36 commented 5 years ago

I'd like to see minor unclassified roads rendered differently then residential. So if adding more colors would help with that I'm for it. Otherwise, not so much and I agree with @Tomasz-W omasz-W that it would just be over complicating things. The only other viable solution I see is not rendering minor roads at higher zoom levels.

Otherwise, you'll have to reinvent the whole wheel just to patch a small hole in the outer tube (in this case changing the rendering of all or most of the roads, just to make railroads look better.

To me it seems a way better option would be the road rendering deprioritizion option, which would resolve other issues also, but that's already been shot down due to the few examples where it would be a problem (which is really debatable anyway), at the expense of the many places that would benefit from it.

Implementing some of @Tomasz-W suggestions in https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/3538#issuecomment-447428874 might work also (including a railway pattern). I'd like to see them tried out first before the wheel reinvention commences.

vholten commented 5 years ago

A railway pattern would be a way to distinguish railways from roads, but the pattern that we currently use would make railways even more prominent at low zooms instead of less.

The TileMill documentation has an example with a more subtle railway pattern:

A common way of symbolizing railroad lines is with regular hatches on a thin line. This can be done with two line attachments - one thin and solid, the other thick and dashed. The dash should be short with wide spacing. styling-lines-9

Adamant36 commented 5 years ago

@vholten, to me its 50/50 between making it less prominent versus making it clearly distinguishable from roads. A patter might make it stand out more, but at least its clear its a railroad that way. I'm not sure if it balances out though.

Tomasz-W commented 5 years ago

We have better protected areas borders and country borders merged, but there are still few things to decide/ test:

@vholten Do you plan further work on this issue?

jeisenbe commented 4 years ago

Updated title to match 2 remaining suggestions: lighter railways, less prominent minor highways at z8-10.

dieterdreist commented 4 years ago

-1 to lighter railways, the dark color is required to distinguish them from roads. Current railway color is quite intuitive.

Minor highways aren't shown at all at z8, and are unobtrusive in z9 and 10, if they would be even less prominent they would be hard to see at all.

jeisenbe commented 4 years ago

Agreed. I'm inclined to close this issue, since the test images above did not seem to be a clear improvement in all areas.

The current use of highway tags is quite different in places like England vs developing countries and North America, so it's difficult to get an ideal rendering for all countries with a global stylesheet. Rendering tertiary or secondary roads at a later zoom level would be an improvement in places like England, but not in western Australia or eastern Indonesia.

And currently roads and railways keep mostly the same colors at different zoom levels - changing railways to a lighter color would make it more difficult to distinguish them from minor roads.