Render highway=pedestrian and highway=living_street same as highway=residential on z13

[Prince-Kassad]

Partially reverts #3467

Currently, highway=pedestrian is not rendered at all on z13, while highway=living_street is rendered just like in higher zoom levels.

Both are problems on their own: Cities that make heavy use of pedestrian zones look really funny on z13 because only the residential roads render and the pedestrian ones don't. They appear to have huge gaps of nothingness in their historic city centers.

See Barcelona: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/41.4047/2.1827
Zurich: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/47.3734/8.5621
Basel: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/47.5667/7.6446

As for highway=living_street, it's more or less impossible to make out against the landuse=residential gray on z13, which is also a problem in cities that make heavy use of living streets.

See Madrid: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/40.4317/-3.6813
The Hague (district De Bras): https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/52.0478/4.4201
Zinnowitz (island of Usedom): https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/54.0879/13.9499

If today were 2006, I would not have supported a highway=living_street and instead have suggested tagging the living_street property as a separate tag i. e. living_street=yes, which would have solved the problem with service roads connecting to living streets looking super ugly as well. But 13 years later it's almost impossible to change a long established tagging practice, so we have to make do with this.

Anyway, on this zoom level, it's not important to distinguish whether the road is accessible to cars or not, as all you'd ever want to do at z13 is get a general idea of the city's road network, which doesn't require differentiation between residential and living_street or pedestrian. We already generalize for landuse on lower zoom levels, so I don't see an issue with generalizing for roads too, at least for z13.

[jeisenbe]

Residential areas are lightness 89 (in Lch), living_street fill is L 94, and residential is 100; they are all close to neutral gray, so lightness is the main difference. Living streets on commercial or retail landuse are visible enough.

Current rendering of Luxembourg city, z13 (no pedestrian roads, but living streets shown in southeast part of city centre):

z14 current

[jeisenbe]

It's strange to render cycleways, which in this example are small paths in a park, and not render the important pedestrian streets in the city centre. I'd support restoring the rendering of pedestrian streets at z13.

The idea of using a lighter fill color for highway=pedestrian and highway=living_street at this zoom level is interesting, and could be tested. Perhaps a lighter shade of gray, short of white, would be more visible. We could also try using higher chroma, like the current pedestrian road fill, but lighter, like living_street, which might provide better contrast with residential landuse and other near-gray areas.

[jeisenbe]

@matkoniecz what part of this suggestion do you disagree with? Rendering highway=pedestrian at z13, or rendering highway=living_street the same as highway=residential at z13?

[imagico]

Note we use a fairly dark casing color for highway=pedestrian, much darker than the standard casing color for white roads and living streets. This has been a deliberate choice to make the casing well visible despite the dark fill used for highway=pedestrian. But it also makes pedestrian roads extra heavy at small line width like we had it on z13 before #3467. See also #3976.

So making the pedestrian roads fill less dark and making the casing less dark could help with allowing to re-introduce pedestrian roads at z13 without it being too noisy and/or heavy. See also #3891 (comment). This would require revising other colors (living street and parking, see #3891).

[matkoniecz]

@jeisenbe Both of them, but here my protest is much weaker than elsewhere and I think that both what is now and what is proposed here is roughly equivalent in quality, as long as distinction between this two is preserved at higher zoom levels (#3961).

[jeisenbe]

How about rendering highway=pedestrian the same as highway=living_street at z13 only, but keeping both different than highway=residential at z13? Then at z14 or z15 they would all still have different renderings as now?

[matkoniecz]

I am not going to protest if in tests it leads to overall improvements. From what I remember I was not entirely sure which version was preferable, so it is possible that for someone else this change will be a clear improvement.

[jeisenbe]

Closing in favor of #3961 (Render highway=pedestrian same as highway=living_street at z13 (and z14?))