Gates are too prominent #323
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the same area with even worse looking level 15 http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.7092&mlon=10.5101#map=15/51.7092/10.5101 |
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example of gate at level 16 where displaying makes sense http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=50.0612&mlon=19.9136#map=16/50.0612/19.9136 I think that it is clear that displaying it at level 15 is really not necessary, displaying it from 17 is also generally a good idea. I am not 100% sure about displaying it only at 18 and higher. |
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Ok. Maybe the tagging should be adapted. For those gates on small footways leading onto private ground (a garden or backyard) or in fences between building leading to a privat parking spot or a path to the backyard its not neccessary to be rendered on zoom level 18 and smaller. On level 16 many of them look like they are blocking a street not a small way leading from a street into the garden (see http://osm.org/go/0GtqzMGk?m=). But the info-boards are definately not necessary on zoom-level <=18. |
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What about adding access=private to private gates and not displaying gates with this tag (or displaying it on lover zoom levels)? Private gate is functionally the same as fence. @info-boards - can you create a separate issue for this one? |
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Rendering gates with access=private not before zoom level 19 sounds reasonable to me. |
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Treating access=no like access=private is also a good idea. |
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2014-01-30 Bulwersator [email protected]:
this is a really complex topic, and no simple solution is in reach (as long There are also similar situations e.g. a path in the mountains where there In any case, not displaying gates with access=private or access=no is not |
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Can you give an example of a private access gate that should be prominently displayed? I never encountered one, but maybe it is again something strongly depending on location. |
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In Luxembourg it would also be desirable to not render private access gates at a low zoom levels: |
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And example from my city of private gates that really should not appear on this zoom level of map: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=50.0704&mlon=19.8846#map=16/50.0704/19.8846 |
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The example of gates that should appear on large maps are usually road gates in rural access. When I look at maps of state parks, knowing the fire road has a gate (which usually means it's locked) means there is no car access into the area we want. which is http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/32.9635/-116.5815 Just like the parking areas, we need to separate their render on either access, size, or some other parameter. Maybe a dark green gate for public/customers/designated, dark red for private, and black for a basic gate=yes tag? This also is similar to the parking isle labels that get rendered before the parking isles do - does the fence itself get rendered with the gate? I guess there is no easy solution to map them to each other. Every time we come back to rendering, I always get the feeling we should implement an "Importance" or "prominent" tag to positively or negatively affect what zoom level an item is first rendered at. The Mt Fuji would render at +5, and the little Mt Fuji next to my house (all 100m of it) would be -3. Similar with rural access gates (or the park gates, +2) and fence gates (-2). I know that this is not the place for implementing a new tag, so at least rendering on access (and additionally changing the color based on access), should be be a good first step. |
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"knowing the fire road has a gate (which usually means it's locked) means there is no car access into the area we want" Maybe this can be done by setting proper access tag on road like at http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=50.06755&mlon=19.91168#map=18/50.06755/19.91168 ? I see nothing set for road at http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=32.98334&mlon=-116.57031#map=17/32.98334/-116.57031 Some roads with emergency access only for vehicles are tagged as highway=pedestrian ( example: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=50.0403&mlon=19.9053#map=16/50.0403/19.9053 ). It may be also possible to consider only private gates on footways as not so important and not render it at lower levels, it would avoid changing anything in situations like this. Manual importance tag is a bad idea, we would have edit wars within 10 minutes. But it is possible to find this value in an automatic way (very easy example: is wikipedia tag present? This one may work for mountains, for gates primitive version may be based on what is blocked (see paragraph above). |
You are right, access afterwards would be a good way, although changing them to pedestrian (in a rural area) is not - they are always shown as larger access roads (tracks) on maps (local knowledge), and often labeled as roads, though there are no cars allowed. however, they usually connect into a very large (and not very well mapped) track road system, where you could start off 20 miles away on a dirt road, and not realize halfway over the mountains there is a locked gate where it turns from private/ forestry lands where you can drive into into a state park where you can't. To continue the talk about tags in general: There has to be some form of simple grading of importance, or some kind of nuance added to more of the tag, doing it one tag at a time by voting means that most of the necessary tags end up as abandoned proposals, which not only discourages the creator (because his work is not "validated" by the group) but future people who find it abandoned. my mind keeps coming back to mountains. There is no "hill" tag, "prominence" tag, or "mount" tag, so everything gets mountain. There are 7 super famous mountains (jn Japan) in my region, all of them have 3+ sub-peaks (they are caldera volcanoes, so they have rim of little hills) but there is no way to force the "volcano" tag to be shown instead of these little peak names, nor to make it show at low zoom levels. meanwhile the 100m little blob sticking out of the rice field has the same name importance as Mt Fuji. I know it is an extreme example, but it illustrates the extreme end of the scale. mountain = hill / prominence/ yes / mount would solve the issue for 99% of mountains, but it seems that most everything needs a similar sort of sliding scale for size. There has to be someway to tag nuance or importance - we grade roads from motorway to 5th grade track - thats 14 different grades of roads - pedestrian has 4. there are 5 different kinds of wetlands. There has to be something to denote importance on some basic level. Does this mean making a gate=[?] tag? Same thing with mountain=[?] I'm new to OSM, and new to wiki based code submission projects, so maybe my frustration is common with newbs. I wish I knew CSS to write code for the project, just to help make OSM/carto the best it could be. |
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Some quick thoughts:
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2014-02-05 Andy Allan [email protected]:
still, as you know for sure, we do use data that is structured like this
+1 |
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@gravitystorm |
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Rant on importance: I can tell one is more important than the other, and it is verifiable to others. One is a 200m hill, one is a 2600m Volcano. ' Mt Akagi is:
The little peaks around the Mt Akagi cadera? no one knows them whatsoever, unless you are a hiker. And for our discussion, a massive landmark for navigation. It's posted on signs all over the trunk roads and motorways. Why wouldn't I want a method to reflect that importance on a map?! Why is there a "landmark" icon tag then? The wiki suggest tagging important trees and large moraine boulders. Didn't they have to gauge the importance between rocks? People gauge the importance with tertiary roads as well. if you are talking about making a database of everything, in purely OSM terms, then there is no importance. I get it. in -carto, they are turning that data into a useful map. and creating a map means making decisions of what and what not to show, and it seems to me that all what this action page is - changing things to match the importance people feel they should be, solving errors to make the map better.
OSM talks about Local knowledge, which of course makes the OSM DB great, and local importance helps makes the -carto map more useful. It can be locally or regionally verifiable, but they may not be verifiable in a source or language your familiar with. It maybe be abusable, but OSM is trusting that people wont abuse it, right? that I won't tag everything motorways and draw a Godzilla building on Mt fuji, right? PS: I'm very interested in the carto CSS. I want to help out to make the map the best it can be. |
That doesn't sound very good. @gravitystorm, is the bottleneck the amount of time you have available to evaluate the requests, or is it a hint to us for setting our priorities to different issues? Perhaps it would again be a good moment for strategical guidance/discussion, for example by extending the roadmap in README.md? |
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@math1985 yes, my time is limited. @Bulwersator some pull requests wait for a while, some are merged within a day. But there's no way to do @math1985 with regards to priorities, I'm interested in everything except for adding dozens more features. Given the limited amount of time I have (somewhere between 0 and 168 hours per week, by definition, but more usually 2-3 hours) I could end up doing nothing except review pull requests for the tens of thousands of features in OSM that we don't currently render, and get nothing else done. I don't know whether it's more appropriate to leave valid PRs open while I work on other things, or close them. I find doing anything to them - whether commenting or closing - just leads to more comments and fewer commits. Perhaps assigning them to a "new features" milestone is a compromise? |
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It might be make more sense if you gave example of what things you are interested in. All things are new feature one could argue. Do you mean 'bugs' in the existing rendering? Things not rendered correctly? Some of those I would argue that new rendered features are more useful then a rendering bug where footpath tunnels at level -15 or not rendered correctly. If we mean more re-factoring do you have a list of specific tasks in mind? For this issue of Gates, Yeah we likely do render too far out and ones for private especially should be rendered even lower. For mountains (how on earth did we get onto that) the most sensible way of rendering these is for looking at the elevation (elv) tag and the higher the are they prominently they can be rendered at different zoom levels. |
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@gravitystorm It is totally understandable that you can only do so many things in a given time. Because this discussion is getting off-topic, I opened a new topic issue for this discussion: #328. |
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@Rovastar Sorry, I used mountains as an example of how OSM has different grades of things for some things and not others, and I thought instead of making these grades for everything, an importance tag would be goo, but @gravitystorm says that really isn't a good idea. Sorry to pull it off topic. |
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Additional problem: gates may block display of more important objects, for example at http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=49.4713&mlon=21.3812#map=16/49.4713/21.3812 cemetery gate blocks display of cemetery name. |
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Also, there is problem with tradeoffs. In my opinion one of the most important things is that adding correctly tagged object should never, ever reduce quality of the map. |
As @Rovastar says, in rural areas. If I'm planning a bike ride around e.g. http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/51.4526/-1.7017 then seeing the gates is useful. To zoom in to z17 (or z18 as seems to be suggested here) would mean an awful lot of panning around to look for any. |
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2014-10-02 1:33 GMT+02:00 Derek Kniffin [email protected]:
no, this is orthogonal. You can have a gate that is locked but the roads on |
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My issue with gates is that they are rendered at z15 while the fences are not, leaving standalone gates like these I put into #1009 everywhere. For some places it does not matter, like standalone gates in middle of roads, but it urban areas this clutters the map. |
What are the access restrictions on that gate? The access tags are missing. I also noticed that we currently have no tagging to distinguish between gates that are usually open, and gates that are usually closed (but unlocked). |
We should probably be showing gates and linear barriers at the same zoom. My gut feelign is z16 is suitable for that - at z15 we're still in more of an overview of the area |
I've no idea, I've never been there I just picked somewhere at random. It was more just to use it as an example - when using the map, we don't want people to have to zoom in too far to examine huge areas for gates if they only show up on z17. |
It depends. If it is a gate that is always in open position, and passage is allowed for anyone, I don't see a reason for prominent rendering on z16 or lower, even in otherwise empty areas. |
What's the point of the gate then? Do you have an example of this? I'm sorry if I seem pushy. I'm just trying to really understand the usecase where gates at < z17 are useful. So far, we've been talking vaguely about it and I haven't found a single instance where it's actually needed. The case @mkoniecz gave on 1/30 (http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=50.0612&mlon=19.9136#map=16/50.0612/19.9136) is a decent one, but I think I'd zoom in before visiting the area anyway. As for the example @javbw I still don't think I understand. Wouldn't you only be able to approach that gate from the east, if it's closed? In what scenario would you find yourself at the west side of that gate when it's locked? Here's the overpass turbo link for this key pair, btw: http://overpass-turbo.eu/?key=barrier&value=gate&template=key-value I've been searching around trying to find a good example, and I haven't found any yet, but I'll keep looking. |
Gate in this case would be a barrier that is not allowing passage through this road. Note that with current display it includes gate that may be opened by anyone, so it is only a potential barrier. http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=50.0612&mlon=19.9136#map=16/50.0612/19.9136 partially fits, as it is closed during nights. |
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Oh, cool. Glad to see a pull request merged for z15. So really, what we're discussing here is just z16. I may have found a good case to show it at higher zooms. In some areas, there are gates that close during flooding. For example, there's one for this bike path that only closes during floods. Some of those might be important to know, but this particular one is not relevant until about z18. (It's also not mapped at the moment, because I'm trying to figure out the best way to tag it) |
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The only examples I can think of are large forest reserves, such as national parks. many of them are covered with fire roads, which are generally open to hikers, mountain bikers, and horses - but not to cars. The track will have access to cars restricted at that point. A) the gate is a landmark of sorts, because it is shown on hiking maps. Some gates are very far away from civilization, where the road crosses from private property ( or unrestricted public use) into the park, so the gate is a good one to show at low zoom levels so you can orient yourself. B) many of those tracks start miles and miles away, and finding a locked gate on 15 miles of track is something that can completely ruin a drive, so showing that the gate is there is very important. I know this may only affect a small percent of gates, in mostly rural ( or uninhabited) places, but it is the example that springs to mind. I hope there is some kind of separation of gates, like a major-minor separation so the tagger has more input in its rendering than the renderer. We trust them to draw the ways correctly, tag the ways correctly, and align the ways correctly, we should be able to trust them with their opinion on the gate too. Javbw
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I spoke to @math1985 at our Midlands social last night about this. For transparencey my comment was essentially that I felt that it would be a shame to remove things from the render/change the zoom level due to some micro mapping creating (rendering) clutter in a few cities in our most mapped part of OSM. In rural locations gates are an important feature and landmark (when walking on the UK's rural footpaths, I often look for the gate on the other side of the field when there is no obvious paths/desire lines). Since speaking to @math1985 I have remembered that we also have some gated public roads in the UK. I'm sure there are quite a few examples, but the ones I could find quickly are in the Yorkshire Dales: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@54.3748972,-1.0552395,3a,45.7y,205.7h,84.35t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sv6416bwv-LMtI-ved_dbpw!2e0 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@54.4663429,-0.8627076,3a,75y,214.54h,70.17t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s8m5jH-FyTC9-Csj_BEGI_A!2e0 Roads with a bit more traffic get a cattle grid with a gate to the side for horse riders to use: Finally roads with Winter closures (due to snow etc) often have a gate that can be closed when conditions become too poor to safely drive on them. |
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I think we can defer further discussion until the z15 change is rendered everywhere, making gates consistent with other barriers. |
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I am even considering closing this ticket and opening new one - with summarized discussion and applicable examples. Many current examples are from z15 and therefore currently misleading. |
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I'd vote to keep this thread open (not that I get a vote - but this is my opinion, for what it's worth). Most of the examples given above are still quite bad at z16, and the issues are much the same. E.g., http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/52.2033/0.1175, http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=50.0503&mlon=19.9250#map=16/50.0503/19.9250, http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/51.2998/11.4330. Apart from being just cluttered, the symbols are comparable in size to the width of the road and it's sometimes hard to see if the road itself has a gate across it. Addressing a point from above: I don't think it's possible to dismiss the problem as due to micromapping. These highly mapped areas are presumably where the "early adopter" enthusiasm is and we may expect that more places will follow the lead of these. So the problem of clutter will become progressively more widespread and will have to be addressed at some point. [Edit: spurious tree comment deleted] |
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Maybe we should render gates much later when tagged on some types of way (like private access and service roads)? |
Gates in fences are often much to present on the map. In my region I mapped several fences with smaller gates in it and they are very annoying on smaller zoom levels. I thing it would be better not to render them in zoom-levels lower than 18.
Same with information boards. I've mapped plenty of them and I believe all those small info-board belong into the osm database but rendering them on zoom-level lower than 18 seems also to much.
For example see this area: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/51.7123/10.5129
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