[OSM-dev] MAPNIK - proposal to drop rendering of underground railway lines

Andy Allan gravitystorm at gmail.com
Wed May 16 17:51:30 BST 2007


On 5/16/07, Nick Black <nickblack1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> To clarify, by underground railways I mean railways that go under the
> ground.  They cant be seen from the surface and so are not useful for
> navigation.  Further, I'm not sure if the underground lines in London, at
> least, should even be in OSM as they are just straight lines inbetween
> stations and don't represent geometry.  The nodes should be in the db, but
> the lines should be inserted by the renderer/editor or whatever client is
> being used.

I disagree. I looked at central london last weekend and thought "cool!
The underground lines show up - there's a nice addition that other
maps don't have". I'm happy to see a distinction made between
tunnel/not tunnel, but I think both should be rendered anyway.

It's a bit annoying that whoever put them in didn't make much effort
to get them right - a lot of the time you can get a fairly accurate
route for the sub-surface lines from the satellite photos (when they
go under houses, there's typically a limit to the size of building
built over the 19th century tunnels - so you can follow where the line
goes). But I think putting a bit more effort into making them right
(and look good) would be better than chopping them off of the maps.

It's worth remembering that the tunnels are physically there, and can
be mapped to a fair approximation, given a bit of effort.

Andy




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