Bug Report: highway=road Rendering Issue

cmoffroad commented 3 months ago

Description

I would like to bring to your attention an important issue regarding your rendering of unknown roads (highway=road).

According to the OpenStreetMap wiki, the tag highway=road is intended for temporary use for roads/paths that have not yet been surveyed.

This can encompass a wide range of paths, from hiking trails to major motorways.

When a particular renderer needs to display these roads, it is advisable to make them visually distinct from other rendered ways to avoid confusion.

For an outdoor-focused renderer like yours, there is no necessity to display highway=road tags. Displaying these unsurveyed or potentially erroneous roads and trails could mislead end-users.

For reference, Komoot, LocusMap, maps.me and now Strava, have already implemented solutions to hide these tags by default. We recommend adopting a similar approach to enhance the accuracy and reliability of your maps.

Sources:

Steps to reproduce

Open the Overpass Query using this link: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1OIG
Zoom out to your area of interest and click "Run." 
Zoom in on each highway=road segment from the results. 
Copy the zoom level and coordinates, then apply them to the Strava Map URL.
The highway=road segments appear as minor paved roads. 
These segments should not be visible until an OSM mapper surveys and classifies or removes them.

Sample:

Open this OSM Way for reference: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/89185730/history
Navigate to this segment at zoom 16, coordinates: 18.2289, 98.6966

Actual result

Currently, it appears as a large paved road.

Expected result

Ideally, segments tagged with highway=road should not be visible by default. If there is an option to enable them (e.g., OSMMapperAssistant), the rendering should be distinctly different from all other highway classifications, such as a thin gray line.

Your Environment (required)

WARNING Crash-Logs MAY contain information you deem sensitive. Review this CAREFULLY before posting your issue!

OsmAnd Version:
Android/iOS version:
Device model:
Crash-Logs: ?

cmoffroad commented 2 months ago

Any chance you could look into this ? Other outdoor platforms like Strava, Mapy, GuruMaps, and Maps.me have already rolled out a fix. Thanks a bunch in advance! 🙏🙏🙏

vshcherb commented 2 months ago

I'm afraid it's out of scope for default rendering style

cmoffroad commented 2 months ago

I'm afraid it's out of scope for default rendering style

Is that a technical limitation, or is there something else? I'm a bit surprised because all the other apps I reached out to had no issues and agreed to hide them.

sonora commented 2 months ago

Fixed for the Touring view renderer in https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/commit/cf52dd690c844070a0ed697af0d279c8f69d342f.

highway=road is not hidden by default, but now rendered distinguishable. (Same dash style as for highway=proposed and highway=construction, but separate gray color pattern.)

sonora commented 2 months ago

PS: It seems the OSM naming "road" for the value (or how the value is nowadays recommended only for "fixme" cases), is really unfortunate. The multitide of uses and also of renderers not compliant with how the OSM wiki nowadays prescribes using it prove that it is rather counterintuitive to try to convey the alerting meaning "unsurveyed" by the inconspicouos expression "road".

sonora commented 2 months ago

Inspecting our default renderer (where fixing this would fix it for most other of our map styles, as many dependent renderers do not have separate code for highway=road):

We allow rendering of highway=road as a area, which should probably be removed, the OSM wiki allows the k/v combination only for lines
We have one (dedicated) code section where highway=road is handled (for lines), so a modification there to produce a separate appearance (like with a distinguishable color and/or dash pattern) would not seem complicated. Question is more how distinguishable exactly we would want things.

Check the legend for Touring view to see how I have done it there:

Click to expand

cmoffroad commented 2 months ago

Check the legend for Touring view to see how I have done it there:

Looks great! Do you have any visual samples on how construction/proposed looks like ?

sonora commented 2 months ago

construction is the same in 'construction orange and white' :wink:, and proposed (just notice it seems not part of our automated legend somehow, but I have strawmanned it below) is the same but white replaced by gray:

Please note that this is for OsmAnd's "Touring view" map style (a specialized high-detail outdoor/touring style). But OsmAnd comes with a variety of user selectable map styles, most of which define only deltas vs. OsmAnd's default "OsmAnd" style. So I would say only fixing that one (code ref) may probably finally justify closing this issue.

osmandapp / OsmAnd