[Talk-GB] Route planning (was:Re: Restoring a usable map service!)

[ajt1047 at gmail.com]

Tangentially from the "we want our old colours back" discussion, I 
recently had a go** at showing "stuff that's more useful"* at lower zooms:

http://i.imgur.com/A8FYFUO.png

that roughly corresponds to 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/52.498/-2.310 .  At this zoom level 
it's essentially a subset of what OSM Carto use to show.

However I'm not convinced that "route planning" is a sensible addition 
to what the "standard map" is supposed to show; it already has a fairly 
impossible job specification (show everything to provide mapper 
feedback, but still "look nice").  If you want a "route planning" map 
then (for now at least) use MQ Open 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/52.498/-2.310&layers=Q which at 
this zoom works really well.

With regard to whether there's a place for a "UK standard" style, Rob's 
survey back in August (see 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2015-August/017637.html and 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A8rKyKUW0X01n-JEMLwEUT4ktX-7WrxNP03YTkZs6lU/edit?pli=1 
) had that as one of the lower priorities.  If someone creates a map 
style that works here and people use it, great, but it won't happen on 
its own and any number of mailing list posts won't make it happen 
either.  Lots of people already use "their own" map styles, and there's 
no "correct" answer to most of the questions a new style has to answer- 
see the difference between 
http://cycle.travel/map?lat=52.4786&lon=-1.9432&zoom=9 and 
http://www.opencyclemap.org/?zoom=10&lat=52.49011&lon=-2.09342&layers=B0000 
, for one example of two solutions to the same problem.

There are already lots of available maps using OSM data, including 5 
different ones on the osm.org site itself.  To complain that the colours 
on one of them have changed (after substantial discussion on github, in 
numerous mailing list posts and lots and lots of OSM diary entries) is 
to miss the point somewhat.

Cheers,
Andy (SomeoneElse)

* here in the UK.  It's not intended as a suggestion for osm.org's 
"standard map style" as by definition that's an International style.

** mostly in https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/openstreetmap-carto-AJT

On 01/11/2015 10:18, tony wroblewski wrote:
> I much prefer that style in your screengrab. It clearly shows what is
> or isn't a motorway and I think it's almost universally accepted (In
> Europe at least), that motorways are shown in blue.
>
> The current problem I see with the new default style is that it's very
> very difficult to now plan routes on a zoomed out map. I can't clearly
> see, for example, what is or isn't a motorway around Birmingham.
> Although the new theme looks nice, it is much less practical than the
> old one
>
> On 1 November 2015 at 11:02, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 31/10/15 21:51, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>>> As for the remainder of your posting, about a "single base" and how all
>>> this is somehow related to a few colours changing on the osm.org map, I
>>> think you lost me there.
>> Answered the colour problem in the thread on New Map Style.
>>
>> The problem with setting up a tile server is the GENERATION of the tiles
>> and how that can be modified to provide the other element I've been
>> banging on about. Viewing the UK at a point in time rather than simply
>> providing what is the current often incorrect view of the country.
>> (Roads around Coventry are still wrong while the older views were
>> actually better). I switched from Apache to Nginx on the servers for the
>> performance improvements it gives working with the PHP sites I manage,
>> and it SHOULD be simple to get Nginx to front access to both the tile
>> server and the editing tools for playing with the style sheets. It
>> proxies everything else happily enough and serves all the PHP static
>> material directly.
>>
>> I got to
>> http://lsces.co.uk/storage/attachments/71/2071/osm-lsces-z11.png but I
>> need to pull the nice county boundary twiddle from the French style
>> sheet now and work out why some mass 'farm' areas still display
>> incorrectly. That one is a tagging problem in the data!
>>
>> http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/OSM+Development was where I was back in August,
>> but I've not been able to get back to that since, and the current fire
>> fighting will add further to that delay :(
>>
>> --
>> Lester Caine - G8HFL
>> -----------------------------
>> Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
>> L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
>> EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
>> Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
>> Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk
>>
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