For those that did not check on Mateusz Konieczny diary entries[1],
postings to this mailing list and github discussions then the Proposed
Great Colour Shift might come as a surprise if it is implemented.
According to the github discussion there is an "overwhelming consensus"
[2] on moving from current rainbow colour scheme for roads to a
red-yellow only scheme. I am unsure of where this overwhelming consensus
formed because I never saw it on this mailing list nor on talk-dev nor
on announcements, I admit to be an infrequent IRC user but I didn't see
this overwhelming consensus there and so far no one has been able to
tell me where it formed or where I can find it.
The design goal seems straight forward, to discontinue green and blue
for roads and move to red and reddish. For this to happen the decision
was made to shift current primary, secondary and tertiary colours
"upwards" so primary is now the colour of secondary and secondary the
colour of tertiary. Leaving tertiary white.
Tertiary instead gets to be wider than residential and unclassified
roads, but to be able to spot that you need to have it next to them to
see which is the wider one.
This one simple change of bleaching tertiary however is something I find
to be a great hindrance to mapping efforts, particularly in rural areas
where the roads are isolated and panning over the map, wether in iD or
using default tiles. Currently it is easy to spot tertiary roads snaking
through valleys and over vast desert plains, they are yellow and the non
tertiary roads are white. Tertiary is significant there as it denotes
the roads between the villages and towns that are often unpaved but
still the most important, even the only, road. Lesser white colours
imply the roads not being between larger settlements although they could
lead to hamlets. The guidelines for mapping in Africa state thus.
Removing the colour from tertiary makes all mapping that much harder to
verify and quality check. Currently it is easy to see if a tertiary road
is broken with a white unclassified bridge, not so in the proposed Great
Colour Shift.
Mateusz has been forthcoming with all changes and done sterling work in
displaying different areas and how they will look. But he acknowledges
that this change is not beneficial everywhere on the map and now has a
disclaimer:
"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.)"
The question really arises if this change is beneficial or not for the
project. Many hours have gone into it and doing CartoCSS on all these
zoom levels is not trivial. But this is a major shift on the front page
of our website, a blow to those who use the default tiles through uMap
or similarly and depend on the UK rainbow road style and makes life
harder for mappers to visually confirm the type of road.
Should this be a new, alternative style instead?
[1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Mateusz%20Konieczny/diary/35586
[2]
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/1736#issuecomment-130592532
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