Not liking bluish color for Pedestrian Streets/areas

[newnumber2]

The more I create these ways, the more I dislike the water-like coloring currently given to pedestrian street areas. Playgrounds used to have this problem, too, but seems to have been improved.

I would suggest maybe an off-white color or beige. Maybe even something different. Anything but blue!

I also wish I could have searched for any earlier mention of this, but I could not see a way to do it, other than search "This repository" which resulted in blocks of code, but nothing useful to me.

Recent example of such an area that I did:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/38.96842/-77.34092

[kocio-pl]

Currently it's #dddde8 (see this code). What color do you propose? Could you test it (probably with Docker containers) and show some renderings?

[Tomasz-W]

What do you think about paving-bricks pattern?
http://osmapa.pl/w/area/?lat=52.22942&lon=21.00783&zoom=19&ol=QqA

It's originally from MapSurfer style. Link above is an area:highway visualization.

[imagico]

The color has been chosen by @matkoniecz back when the road color redesign was made - IIRC based on my suggestion. You can probably find the discussion in the past issues/PRs related to road colors or the user diary entries related on osm.org.

I don't really see the problem here - to me the color works relatively nicely considering the constraints we have. Also try to look at things at the whole range of zoom levels the color is used, not just z19.

I do think the outline is too strong though - since casing of road lines in a lot of cases is too weak - see #2454 - this probably requires a differentiated approach.

Search function on github is not all that great for text search. If you search you get by default results in the code but on top of the search results you have tabs also offering results in issues.

[matkoniecz]

Note that colour for pedestrian streets/areas needs to be

• far away from colours of other objects, including water, other roads, educational areas, forests, grassland, unmapped area and all other landcover
• recognizable as road
• recognizable as a special kind of road
• close to footways (yes, colour that I selected is nearly complete failure here)
• pretty
• not too strong
• etc etc

[matkoniecz]

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mateusz%20Konieczny/diary has some selected images of alternative attempts

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mateusz%20Konieczny/diary/35555 https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mateusz%20Konieczny/diary/35389 https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mateusz%20Konieczny/diary/35351 are entries that explicitly mention highway=pedestrian

[kocio-pl]

You would have to test a lot. For example switching from blue tint (#dddde8) to the same red tint (#e8dddd), because of footways, doesn't play well with commercial areas and buildings:

Warsaw, z19
Before

After

[matkoniecz]

I would suggest maybe an off-white color or beige.

Main problems that I would expect here would include

• loss of noticeable difference between motorized and pedestrian roads
• may be too close to educational areas, unmapped areas, heaths, bare_rock (is there danger here? I would expect highway=pedestrian to not appear close to natural=bare_rock/heath areas, but it would require a check)
• may be too close to other landcover that I do not remember at this moment
• even further styling distance between footways and pedestrian roads
• many of beige-type colours fail as are extremely ugly/hard to distinguish (especially on low quality monitors or with harsh sunlight)

[imagico]

may be too close to educational areas, unmapped areas, heaths, bare_rock (is there danger here? I would expect highway=pedestrian to not appear close to natural=bare_rock/heath areas, but it would require a check)

That is mostly a matter of cultural bias i think - in flatland areas where most major cities in central Europe are located bare_rock simply does not exist for example. Note highway=pedestrian is not limited to urban environments - you can also have this at observation platforms at tourism sites and similar stuff.

may be too close to other landcover that I do not remember at this moment

mud, garages, aerodrome and farmland all play in here.

[matkoniecz]

mostly a matter of cultural bias i think

Yeah, that is why proper testing is necessary.

mud, garages, aerodrome and farmland all play in here.

Also buildings and allotments.

[matkoniecz]

@newnumber2

In general, there are many things wrong with current road colors - but in this case main problem is that changing things will fix some problems and introduce new ones. It is quite tricky to propose change that overall will improve things.

[kocio-pl]

What do you think about paving-bricks pattern?

It looks pleasant to me and it's even much easier to recognize for me than color-peeping (we could get away with color tints and use light shade of gray). I just don't know how to create this pattern.

[jeisenbe]

See also suggestion in #3961 to render highway=pedestrian same as highway=living_street - but then there is #3891 - Parking fill color is the same as living street fill color.

[swedneck]

osmand uses a paving bricks pattern and it looks very nice, and it's quite intuitive: