I’m an OSM Carto co-developer, who was one of a few people active with this change. Unfortunately this particular problem has not been reported when we were making decisions and testing it, as nebulon42 noticed (who is also co-developer). I learned about it from the fresh weeklyOSM 387.

I think the main problem to think about is proportions and think about the complex problems, not just one particular issue related to it.

Until recently we had no big lakes visible on low zoom levels and (if I remember) that encouraged to tag them as coastline, both of which was much worse in my opinion. My investigation showed that it’s possible to fix these issues by filtering out sub-pixel water areas. It was purely technical obstacle, and solving it allowed us to show all the small, but over-pixel areas on low zoom. So when we just stopped rendering “water haze” of sub-pixel size and we were able to show big waters, we end up also with “water haze” of small, but over-pixel water areas. That’s why we tried to limit also this haze - but this time it was not a technical problem, it was purely cartographic decision, which partially reverts the change with small water areas.

Now - it’s about fixing low levels mainly. The new filter removes smaller waters on z0-z7 only and is regressive (it’s getting weaker when zooming in). On z8+ (which is still big) we just got rid of sub-pixel areas, not small, but over-pixel. We were testing it to not loose to much and we have found that sub-pixel haze was not that big.

I hope that background makes the whole problem a bit more clear. For me personally limiting over-pixel haze on low zoom levels makes map a bit more readable - we don’t have to show all the possible details everywhere, “actual geography” is what we have on aerial pictures. Of course somebody might want to overcome the filter, but we can see if it will really happen or not.

Previously grass was not visible in gardens, which is much more common problem IMO. But the main problem is that park and garden are more similar than garden and grass, see:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2956#issuecomment-346730261

Protect_class=7 is closer, but you tell us that won’t be rendered.

No, I didn’t. What made you think like that?

Please read again rendering section. I haven’t said that anything would not be rendered, it’s rather about rendering priority and testing how would this particular idea work in practice.

Please don’t try to alter what’s on the ground to make the rendering prettier.

I don’t even plan to move away from home, let alone change some objects on the next continent…

The state of conservation areas in the world seems to be quite complicated and my ambition is rather to make it sane in general. I don’t even have a hope to make it “pretty”.

Thanks, that’s another thing to test…

I will start with using different zoom levels, but most probably there will be more than just one change.

We already have keys for ownership - no need to introduce anything new and mix it with other features.

We have the name of the owner (I guess you mean operator= tag), but it does not tell if it’s private, governmental or something other. That’s why governance_type=private_landowner is needed.

For me there are more problems: - tags fragmentation - lack of clear classification system - borders clutter - labels clutter (as shown on your rendering)

My questions: 1. Maybe skipping borders would help, but when should they appear? 2. But you also show some border here - how did you select just the outer one?

Thanks for this work!

I have updated it lately and there are still some things missing, but it is the most comprehensive key that we may have. I doubt that we could do that in the automated way.

In Poland we’re using special app for hydrants surveying:

• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.openstreetmap.dotevo.strazak

There are also special sites for viewing them:

• https://www.osmhydrant.org/en/
• http://openfiremap.org/

To be more precise: subway entrances refs are rendered now.

Hangzhou and Xuzhou are now visible, I guess - there were just some problems with the proper code, which were fixed in v2.44.1.

I think adding population numbers would be an overkill for a general map.

There are also other places called Mordor, I don’t know if these names are real or fake:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/409822789 http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/324839921

That’s probably problem with mod_tile not processing TTC file format.

Is it still a proof of concept or there’s a chance to have it deployed?

Quite fast, looking at last two versions it was up to one day:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/chef/issues/70 https://github.com/openstreetmap/chef/issues/71

For new version deployment watch this issue:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/chef/issues/75

Can you maybe give an example where this happens? It is worth testing.

Just a quick search.

At least roads through beaches are rare.

They may be running through the natural=sand however (for example in some areas of Africa).

I have no strong notion toward showing “major” buildings at this level, size matters more in this case. I would rather skip showing all the buildings for now, because they won’t make any pattern anyway (and that’s what other users were interested in), but maybe we could find sane threshold for displaying really big/important buildings. However I guess we don’t have to do it now and add them later if needed.

Last but not least: I’m deeply impressed by the work you’ve done already and the way you interact with the rest of community! While it’s called merely “new road style”, for me it’s much needed general overhaul of the middle zoom levels, because you also care for many other details. Thanks, and I mean A LOT! =}

I think making landuse=residential darker would compensate also for lack of buildings on this level. IMO z12 is middle scale and the most important shapes here are lines (roads, railways), landuses/natural areas (water, forest, residential, industrial, military, fields, airports…) and names of cities/towns/villages. Individual buildings just don’t belong here - their generalized “pattern” is just landuse area.

But if we want to show some buildings anyway, I would consider rendering special buildings only (also called “major”). Currently they are just places of worship, but it’s way too narrow and we should expand it with other public building types, like castle or stadium. This way we would have overall impression where people live (landuse=residential) and we could spot the most important buildings easily.

I think the only sane solution is to just start drawing landuse=residential where they are still not tagged. This is exactly kind of synthetic measure needed for low and medium level, the same as other types of areas like forests, farmlands or water.

Residential roads clearly belong to higher zoom level, z=12 is too early for them - it already makes more complete mapped places look worse and less mapped places look better, so I consider it kind of penalty for making good work.

Why should we wait any longer - and how long should it be?

I was already Linux citizen journalist and an active Wikipedian, so OSM was just next interesting project to try contributing to. I started with streets and house numbers in my hometown and today I mostly like micromapping it with shops and services (because I never remember such details as opening hours!) or other local amenities to reflect real space better and try to make default map style better suited for this task (I designed and proposed a few icons lately), because it’s fun and I think many average users would also like to have the most detailed map of their neighborhood possible. I also try to translate tools like JOSM or Wiki pages, because I use it a lot and I want to lower the entry barrier for other mappers.