The current state of map design in OpenStreetMap

• Openstreetmap

  741 2,029 9.9 Ruby

  The Rails application that powers OpenStreetMap

  

> causing pains that discourage mappers from contributing

Like not rendering (bus dedicated) roads despite them being tagged as (bus dedicated) roads using a tag approved by the community three and a half years ago. The openstreetmap.org website currently shows gaps all over the world wherever bus dedicated roads exist. This certainly discourages for mappers.

Compare:

Carto (default):

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/52.32853/5.04991&layer...

Tracestrack Topo:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/52.32853/5.04991&layer...

• openstreetmap-carto

  34 1,487 6.2 CartoCSS

  A general-purpose OpenStreetMap mapnik style, in CartoCSS

Note that the author of this piece is also directly responsible for blocking the acceptance of many new features in Carto, including community-developed and broadly accepted features like highway=busway:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/4...

Carto is of course just one style for OpenStreetMap, but it is also the default style shown on openstreetmap.org, with direct support from the operational team (server resources etc.). If a high-profile feature is not rendered by Carto, gaps show up all over the world where people use Carto-based screenshots, etc., and of course on openstreetmap.org.

The stagnation of Carto, and thus openstreetmap.org, the website, is one of the major pain points for many mappers and developers in the OSM community, including myself. (It also highlighted the failure of the OpenStreetMap Foundation to deal with this situation, although the recent move to develop a successor vector style is somewhat hopeful).

Personally, this makes me very hesitant to consider anything Christoph Hormann writes regarding OpenStreetMap in a positive light.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• openstreetmap-americana

  8 163 9.4 JavaScript

  A quintessentially American map style

Nice for driving, but not for walking. Look how much pedestrian info is simply not rendered in my home area. Tons of stairs and walkways are not visible:

https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/#map=16...

• saltymill

  2 31 10.0 SaltStack

  Tillmill scripts in SaltStack

First, my remark is about the impact on the adoption of OpenStreetMap in general, not my personal usage of it.

And second - it did not stop me from doing that, but it was extremely difficult, and took months of effort. I built a tool to set up a server with all the components required to download the data, load it into PostGIS, style it with Tilemill and generate and serve tiles: https://github.com/stevage/saltymill

So I find your comment quite disingenuous.

Suggest a related project