[mkgmap-dev] default style improvements

Sun Jan 6 13:50:27 GMT 2019

Bernhard Hiller <bhil at gmx.de> writes:

> I often travel on bike in "nowhere land", where hotels and restaurants
> are rare. So I think it is good to show both PoIs if a hotel contains
> a restaurant. Of course, it would be more relevant to know how other
> users of OSM Garmin maps think about this topic (I use my own style,
> so the changes to the default style are not relevant for me).

There are two issues; one is display, and the other is search.  I think
ti's pretty important that "show me cafes and restaurants nearby" find
hotel restaurants (that are open to non-guests).  I don't think it's
quite as important that they both show up.  But when zoomed all the way
in, it would be nice.  Plus, mappers often put the hotel POI on the
building and a separate restuarant POI where the restaurant is.

> A different point I'd like to suggest is a new line type for unpaved
> highways (which are not tracks). Unpaved public highways may be not
> very common in Europe, but they are rather normal in other areas of
> the world.
> The fact that they are rendered like paved highways makes many mappers
> think that it is useless to add this tag - and the little use of the
> surface tag in turn makes map makers think that it does not
> matter... Clouds of dust caused by other vehicles on that road or
> getting stuck in a muddy quagmire are not great user experiences.
> Treating them differently for routing purposes is a good step, but
> that is not such visible to many users.

Agreed that unpaved public roads should have a different symbol.  (Even
where I am, in Massachusetts, US, they have a significant existence.)

(I think the real reason they don't exist in the UK is that it's too wet
and they would always be muddy.  I drove on some roads there that are so
minor that almost certainly would not have been paved in the US.   And
this UK non-existence of unpaved  real roads has led to some distortion
of their representation in OSM.)