[OSM-talk-be] Multi-layer problems

[Ruben Maes]

Hello everyone

I surveyed near the new Virginie Loveling building near the train
station in Ghent and mapped everything accordingly a few months ago.

There are three levels of public road and the result on the map looks
extremely ugly and unreadable:
   https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/51.03685/3.70898
3D maps can't handle it either (e.g. F4:
http://demo.f4map.com/#lat=51.0367277&lon=3.7088474&zoom=19&camera.theta=71.119&camera.phi=94.252)

The fact that highway=pedestrian is now *always* rendered on top of
buildings (no matter what the layer=* values are) makes things worse.

If you haven't been there, I guess you have no idea how this place
looks in real life from looking at the map. I can't think of any
application that would be able to do something useful with it.
Routing works a bit but if you cannot read the map or get useful
spoken instructions that's not really helpful.

This has left me wondering ... Should we either cut in the provided
data or wait for renderers and applications to be able to handle these
kind of situations? A possible improvement could be something like
Google Maps does: it shows a layer chooser when you come near a
multi-layer place, both indoor and outdoor IIRC. This seems
complicated to implement in the current setup and I don't expect any
OSM map at all to be handling these situations gracefully soon.

There are also problems near the Bruges train station, though it looks
a bit less ugly at first sight.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/51.19707/3.21997

Any ideas?

Groeten
Ruben