[OSM-talk] displayed width of roads

[Robin Paulson]

On 18/02/2008, Abigail Brady <morwen at evilmagic.org> wrote:
> > line is probably twice the width of the actual road. this causes
> > problems at even simple motorway junctions, as the whole thing becomes
> > a big blue mess. could i request this be looked into?
> >
>
> Well, if this isn't done, then roads quickly become hairlines at lower
> zooms.  There's not really much to look into. If you want to see the roads
> they have to be wider than they really are.

yes, they will. but i was talking about close-in zoom - the example i
gave was at zoom 16.  they don't have to be wider at that level, maybe
at zoom 4 they do, but i wouldn't care about details like this at that
zoom level anyway

as i understand it, the tiles are rendered separately for each zoom
level, so what we see at one zoom level is different to what we see at
another

> What a professional road atlas would do here is very likely to exaggerate
> the junction so that it makes sense given the width using to render the
> roads. Doing this algorithmically is hard, but probably not impossible.

that sounds very bad, ugly and wrong on many levels.

whether it's mapped as 'exaggerated' or algorithmically altered later,
i can't see the point. if there's room in reality for the roads to
exist without overlapping, then there's no reason the map can't
reflect that