I agree with most of these suggestions. OSM should render in a manner familiar to Canadian map readers. Road colours should be limited to indicate primary/trunk and secondary/county roads (in practice, that should probably mean no distinction between highway=primary and highway=trunk -- like Matthew, I don't think green works well, especially in a heavily forested country). Road surface should be indicated. Add to that another: toll highways, which are usually indicated on North American maps.
The question of long-distance northern roads is a question of information density. At low zooms, the Canadian map can seem pretty empty if we follow rules appropriate to higher density countries (Guten Tag, Deutschland). Is there a way of changing the rendering threshold for, say, towns so that empty parts of the map would have smaller centres rendered? Generally speaking, I find too much of interest disappears when you zoom out. Points of interest (historic, tourism) only really appear at the highest zoom levels, and that's less useful in places where the point of interest is outside the nearest town (e.g., the Royal Tyrrell Museum). As for rendering things like railways and trails, that hinges on the question of what the map is used for -- i.e., why people are using the map. No one map can cover everything at once: a road map makes a lousy cycling map, and so on. That's where layers come in. But it'll be hard to figure out what information is important without some idea of why people are using the map -- we're still in building mode at this point, I think, so the answer is still to come. -- Jonathan Crowe http://www.jonathancrowe.net
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