Reverted highway=footway, highway=path changes and restored currently used version. highway=motorway, highway=trunk rendering will be distinguishable. For oneway arrows old blue version also will be considered.

In addition feedback confirmed that it would be a good idea to: render motorway junction labels in red and rework widths of roads.

Example of the current rendering of pedestrian area (left - current rendering, right - proposed new rendering). highway=footway styling was rolled back, but highway=pedestrian/living_street is changed.

Request for a testing place

I am looking for a well mapped place where displaying highway=residential on z10/z11/z12 makes sense and is desirable. I am also looking for a place where rendering highway=unclassified at z10 is a good idea. According to my tests rendering these roads later improves situation, except places with badly mapped road types (highway=residential linking towns etc).

highway=residential rendering starting at z13, instead of z10 (on the right - rendering of minor roads starts later)

z10 without both highway=residential and highway=unclassified (on the right - rendering of minor roads starts later)

After such change it would probably be a good idea to make landuse=residential darker on z10/z11/z12 to make area covered by settlements clear.

Testing road width

I am experimenting with resizing roads and I would welcome feedback on these presented versions - what is a better version for highway=residential/living_street/pedestrian? Left or right side? Or maybe both are too narrow/wide?

Note - I would welcome examples of a well mapped rural areas for testing locations.

according to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dpath

highway=path is a generic path, either multi-use or unspecified usage, open to all non-motorized vehicles. The path may have any type of surface.

This includes walking and hiking trails, bike trails and paths, horse and stock trails, mountain bike trails, ski[disputed] and snowmobile trails[disputed] as well as combinations of the above

It is a big problem for designing rendering. Given that definition from wiki highway=path may be anything from paved cycleway, though paved footway or horse trail to mountain bike trail. Some even include snowmobile trails existing only during winter as an acceptable feature to be mapped as highway=path.

For general rendering it would be preferable to have two tags - one for footways/path/sidewalks open for pedestrians and second for weird variations like mountain bike trails and snowmobile trails existing only during winter rather than current situation.

But in reality overwhelming majority of highway=path is used to map paths that are not more open to non-motorized vehicles than highway=footway. It also seems that as result of a difference in Default map style it is very common to consider highway=footway as paved and highway=path as unpaved. Confirmations/refutations are welcomed as my personal experience is mostly limited to Poland - elsewhere it is mostly guessing based on limited research.

So there are following possibilities that may work:

path/footway difference

consider highway=path to be unpaved and highway=footway to be paved (current situation)

stop differentiating between highway=path and highway=footway (render both using current styling of highway=footway or highway=path)

stop differentiating between highway=path and highway=footway, render them differently based on surface tag

invent a new tagging style (highly unlikely that something replacing highway=path/footway would be accepted, but the current one may be improved - see for example http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tag:highway%3Dpath#skiDisputed_and_snowmobile_trailsDisputed )

special access on highway=path (cycleways, bike trails, snowmobile routes)

consider popular combinations equivalent to already rendered road types (current situation, for example [highway=path; bicycle=designated] is considered to be equivalent of [bighway=cycleway]), ignore other)

detect popular combinations, in addition attempt to detect other special cases and do not display highway=path in such cases (foot=no would cause highway=path to not be rendered, except cases where it would be rendered thanks to fitting one of popular combinations)

I would welcome opinions on these possibilities and other ideas that would work. There possibilities that are not listed here because it would lead to poor results. For example differentiate rendering based on both highway=path/footway and surface value with four different stylings is not something that would work. Special rendering for every special case of highway=path is also impossible with a style that is supposed to be usable. Ceasing to detect [highway=path; bicycle=designated] makes no sense.

In addition it may be considered to treat highway=bridleway as a synonym of highway=path given relatively low importance of that way type and high similarity.

rendering highway=proposed

Related to current road restyling - see https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/1654 that contains a proposal to stop rendering highway=proposed (in that case comments should be posted on GitHub issue).

rendering highway=road

I am not sure how to display this road type. In some way that it would make clear that it should be changed to proper highway type? But it would make the map ugly. But maybe in a situation like that it is acceptable?

Attempt to guess what is the most common proper type and render it in this style or close to it as it done currently? But it breaks The Mapper Feedback Loop, also it results in a confusing map where something that resembles highway=unclassified/residential may be anything.

Stop rendering of highway=road? Provided feedback is “you should not use this tag”. It also would be highly confusing, this time for people contributing to OSM.

accepted changes

Next pull requests related to clutter on clutter around z10 were merged: start displaying minor rail from z13, fixes #1645 #1647. As result railway=rail ways with service=yard/siding/spur are no longer rendered on z11 and z12.

Stop displaying really small zoos and theme parks After that change smaller ones will appear later and bigger on earlier zoom levels (before/after with current road styling).