New road style - rework road colours, road widths and display of railway=rail #1736
Conversation
…ility rail is now narrower, darker line on low zoom levels increase visibility of railway=construction, decrease visibility of railway=disused new tunnels for railway=rail - more visible, nicer and cosistent with other railway tunnels
…way=rail Currently used road style has some problems, one the most obvious one is that econdary and trunk color too similar to landuse colors (#102). But there are also other serious problems with basing design on UK road style. Marking different road types by colours in completely different hues works well for maps displaying primarily roads, with limited different styles for other features. This map differentiates wide range of landovers, POIs, borders and names. It is using more different styles than most maps. For example picture below presents road types on some of landcovers displayed in this style. In this situation colours of many road types are closer to other features than to other road types (forest - trunk, motorway - river, tertiary - sand etc). That is not happening for example on Ordnance Survey map where number of differently displayed features is strictly limited. Also, UK color style is not universally known. For many people hierarchy of red, blue and green roads is not obvious. This new road style is using narrower range of hues, making road of different classes more similar what should eliminate possibility of confusing them with other features and makes easier to avoid collisions on changing rendering of other elements. Steady progression of hue and lightness for major road types (motorway, trunk, primary, secondary, tertiary) should make more intuitive which roads are more important. Road colors were also tuned to ensure that roads are well visible on all landcovers. Roads are now narrower, to improve map readablity and make it prettier. Also, more road types are differentiated by width rather than by color (white, wide tertiary). Railways are now more prominent and service tag for railways has bigger impact on rendering. Color of pedestrian and living_street is now more logical and intuitive, without making map uglier. Fixes #102 (secondary and trunk color too similar to landuse colors) Fixes #631 (tertiary roads more dominant than secondary on z10) Fixes #1272 (junction=motorway_junction names are hard to read) Fixes #319 (motorways on low zoom levels are very hard to notice and look like rivers) Fixes #914 (motorway tunnels are nearly invisible on z13 and lower) Fixes #1124 (make road-casing stronger) Reduces impact of #286 (some streets that are not joining may on zoom out misleadingly appear to be joining)
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Nice. A few remarks:
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Additional examples are in general generated, here some already ready pedestrian, with some living street. https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/899988/9202545/b17472a2-4052-11e5-85c9-ae8b94c74337.png
To be more exact it is rather dark gray ( |
That is definitely an improvement, and I think you have even been really conservative with those road width changes. No big style (think Google, Here) but openstreetmap-carto had this wide roads. I do notice one anomaly: in the Z17/18/19 images, the small connecting road between the two sides of the primary road "Via Ciprio", named "Piazzale delle eroi" in the Z19 image, is actually wider in the new style?
I am not to sure about the new "purple" color for this feature (that is how it looks on my calibrated monitor), I would stick with the original light grey, or at least make the color slightly lighter and less saturated. |
Yes, some roads on some zoom levels are wider. It primarily affects tertiary at high zoom levels that lost its colour.
I am also not happy - but the problems is that current living_street is both ugly and illogical. living street is clearly between normal roads and highway=pedestrian. Despite that highway=pedestrian is displayed in style between living_street and normal minor roads. See for example
I consider change of pedestrian & living_street as change from illogical pedestrian and really ugly living_street to OK living_street and weird pedestrian. I tried to achieve better result and failed, but IMHO it is anyway an improvement. |
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Fixes #1064 is that right? |
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@sabas Unfortunately this bug is still present after this changes. |
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I'm not happy with tertiary losing its color, it is a well defined type of road that we use extensively where its legal status is thus here in Iceland and making it vanish makes it harder to see the status of markings. In Iceland we've been careful with using the designated status of roads to mark them as trunk (just one ring road), primary, secondary and tertiary. These changes will make the bottom most layer invisible for no obvious purpose. Do you have a render for this area according to your style? How much color (which carries legal and traffic related meaning) is drained by these changes? Service road also becoming invisible is not a good idea in my mind. AS for good things then current living street has been an ugly stepchild and any change there is to the better. |
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Your new samples for highway=service look much better. |
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Maybe the style from openstreetbrowser.org could help with new ideas how to solve the "problem" that tertiary isn't good visible. in OSB tertiary is a very bright yellow. or maybe take the same color as secondary but thinner and later in color and in low levels only in grey like yet. BTW: Great job! 👍 |
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@matkoniecz I like the highway=service fix. Thanks for the Reykjavík area snapshot. A more pastel version of current tertiary for tertiary like in OSB would be something I would be in favor of. |
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Great work! |
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Thanks for creating the PR! I tested the new style on Luxembourg, and I don't see major problems. A couple of minor suggestions:
I prefer the images next to each other.
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Regardless of preference for color, the blob there is mainly illegible because of the unfortunate coincidence of the oneway arrows and the lift-gate symbol at Z17... |
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Congrats, great work! This is a major improvement, colours are well chosen and I especially like the narrower roads. I had a look within Austria and this is what I noticed:
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@math1985 Thanks for the feedback!
Yes, one of benefits of white tertiary is that it makes possible to have larger color differences between secondary, primary, trunk and motorway. In initial version it was solved by unifying trunk and motorway but nobody liked this. I also thought about unifying seondary and primary - but I expect that there would be a similar reaction. Also, "draining colour" is one of intended effects.
Yes - I am not considering it as great but at least it is no longer terrible.
I opened #1738 as it affects also current version and it would merge cleanly.
I am not too happy about this (see #1698) - but it may be easily changed separately. For this PR I focused on changes that may not be done independently (really popular road types).
In that case I will wait for more opinion as people already complained that it is not visible enough. In case of changing its visibility - manipulating width is probably the best idea.
I will look at this again.
AFAIK road names already have halos. Are you proposing to make it stronger? Or is it not true for all road types.
I will switch to smaller images fitting next to each other (for nearest update there are already many images generated, so it is too late to chnage that but for next one I will do it)
For now it is consistent with dashes on footways and paths. Maybe narrowing for all three would be a good idea.
For me it is ineligible in both cases. |
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Also, thanks @imagico for the idea with blueish gray for highway=pedestrian! In the end it turned out to be better than alternatives that were ranging from "really ugly" to "terrible, run away". |
If i remember correctly, road labels for white roads had no halo so far. |
OK, I will check this. |
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@nebulon42 Thanks for the feedback!
z11 is not well liked. Maybe making it again casingless is a proper solution.
An interesting idea, I will try to play with it.
Nice to see that somebody likes it :)
I am a bit worried that dark on low zoom and less dark on high zooms may make it less intuitive. Also, "something to get used to" may be true - initially it was less dark, later I changed it to make more dark.
Have you tried the new, updated version?
Problem with desaturating is that it gets too close to residential (I amy publish inages from test where I rejected making it less blue).
For me this picture is OK - yes, this roads are not too visible but are also not so important. But maybe halo would be a good solution to keep visibility on dark background? |
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@math1985 All road labels have halo since https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/1010/files and in 52caf88 halos were made transparent. Can you give example of places that would deserve larger halo? It may be result of different letters and I failed to notice problem during testing as name was unreadable anyway due to unfamiliar language and letters. |
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The split between secondary (yellow) and tertiary (now white) is a bit arbitrary and justified by a restricted colorspace and not importance of the road. The former split between tertiary and unclassified/residential was better suited. |
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The idea for the blue tone for pedestrian areas by the way came from the fact that a slightly reddish blue is about the only bright hue not yet taken by any area colors at the moment, see: Since roads are going to be red-yellow it might make sense to consider 'rotating' the urban land covers more towards blue so a reddish tone is free for the pedestrian areas. however within the road color range this would be closest to motorway which is also kind of strange. Another possibility to swap colors would be with education/hospital - that would be a very good tone for pedestrian areas i think but i am not sure how blue would work for those. And such color swaps would of course be confusing for long term map users. |
i think the same ;-) maybe thinner but stronger border lines? |
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Thank you @rrzefox and @pnorman for the previews! About the white tertiaries: I think they do stand out more than the current yellow ones, because of the width and because white gives more contrast than yellow to landuse colours. But I also did not find the pale yellow version terrible. In my opinion, the changes are overwhelmingly positive. We should merge and release this, and then work out any kinks that may become obvious only later. |
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Perhaps we should regenerate the main five key images for the osm homepage, too. |
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@HolgerJeromin Yes, we know about that. It would be preferable to coordinate change also with iD - see openstreetmap/iD#2764 |
I did not mean this as a specific suggestion, just as an observation that the rendering is currently (and at z13 also with this change) off by about one zoom level from optimum in these areas. I fully agree that scale dependent styling (in contrast to zoom level dependent styling) will only work for continuously changeable properties like line widths and not for fundamental changes like the minor roads from z12 to z13. |
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Merging, after discussions with Andy. |
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+1 Thanks @matkoniecz! When are we going to release this? |
New road style - rework road colours, road widths and display of railway=rail
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Thanks to everybody for help, testing, ideas to improve code, ideas for better styling and feedback! |
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Good to see this merged, thanks Mateusz for your great work. |
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Wow! Congratulations! |
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can't wait to see the changes on the map. when is the next release planed? |
There is no ETA on the next release. We want to have a chance to uncover any new bugs first. Historically, releases have been every 1-2 months. |
The nearest planned release is v2.35.0 that will not include this change ( openstreetmap/chef#36 ). It means that it will be necessary to wait for the new roads on the main page - what is intentional. It gives time to update legend on the OSM website, there will be time to implement openstreetmap/iD#2764 and additional time to find bugs that were missed, some people may propose their own PRs tweaking the new style etc. |
Update colours for main roads to match gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto#1736 and replace the OSM keywords trunk, primary and secondary (which have different meanings from OSM use in some places) with a new keyword main_road (main road),
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For anybody interested in road colours, it seems https://www.google.nl/maps also has rolled out new road colouring today. |
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Did...did they just copy Mapbox's "Streets" style? On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 9:14 AM, Matthijs Melissen <[email protected]
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@pnorman @gravitystorm @matkoniecz Google's blog on their new rendering: https://maps.googleblog.com/2016/07/discover-action-around-you-with-updated.html |
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The user reactions in the comments are familiar: :-) "I couldn't agree more. Every change in the last 2 years has made maps worst." |
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sent from a phone
actually I agree with that ,sorry for the OT, Gmaps has become worse in the past years, and slow. |
Currently used road style has some problems, one the most obvious one is that secondary and trunk colour too similar to landuse colours (#102).
But there are also other serious problems with basing design on UK road style.
Marking different road types by colours in completely different hues works well for maps displaying primarily roads, with limited different styles for other features. This map differentiates wide range of landovers, POIs, borders and names. It is using more different styles than most maps. For example picture below presents road types on some of landcovers displayed in this style.
In this situation colours of many road types are closer to other features than to other road types (forest - trunk, motorway - river, tertiary - sand etc). That is not happening for example on Ordnance Survey map where number of differently displayed features is strictly limited.
Also, UK colour style is not universally known. For many people hierarchy of red, blue and green roads is not obvious.
This new road style is using narrower range of hues, making road of different classes more similar what should eliminate possibility of confusing them with other features and makes easier to avoid collisions on changing rendering of other elements. Steady progression of hue and lightness for major road types (motorway, trunk, primary, secondary, tertiary) should make more intuitive which roads are more important.
Road colours were also tuned to ensure that roads are well visible on all landcovers.
Roads are now narrower, to improve map readability and make it prettier. Also, more road types are differentiated by width rather than by colour (white, wide tertiary).
Railways are now more prominent and service tag for railways has bigger impact on rendering.
Color of pedestrian and living_street is now more logical and intuitive, without making map uglier.
Fixes #102 (secondary and trunk colour too similar to landuse colours)
Fixes #631 (tertiary roads more dominant than secondary on z10)
Fixes #1272 (junction=motorway_junction names are hard to read)
Fixes #319 (motorways on low zoom levels are very hard to notice and look like rivers)
Fixes #914 (motorway tunnels are nearly invisible on z13 and lower)
Fixes #1124 (make road-casing stronger)
Fixes #1769 (improve living street rendering)
Reduces impact of #286 (some streets that are not joining may on zoom out misleadingly appear to be joining)
Before using version containing changes from this PR on OSM website it is recommended to change map key for Default map layer.
Among potential problems are that it is now harder to recognise road type of given road, especially in situation where there is no possibility to compare it with other road types.
Such significant change will be confusing for current users of this style.
UK color coding of roads is well known for many people, for them a new style - even assuming that it would be intuitive for them - will be less useful.