OpenStreetMap-Americana, an American-styled OSM map style with Highway shields!

[MoiraPrime]

So I've been closely following and providing feedback about a new map rendering style that might interest a few people here. Zelonewolf and a few other people have been collaborating to make an OpenStreetMap map style that's inspired by American cartography, including things like special rendering for non-motorway expressways and highway shields for every state.

The special rendering for expressways is dependent on the expressway=yes tag. The expressway tag hasn't reached mass adoption yet, but it's getting there.

The github for this project is here: https://github.com/ZeLonewolf/openstreetmap-americana/
You can find a live demo of the project here: https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana

The project is still a WIP, so feel free to provide any feedback you have here (or on github) and I'll be happy to pass it along to the people working on it.

Here's an example screencap for those of you who want an idea of what it looks like without looking at the demo:

[Scott5114]

Oh, cool. The lack of shields is one thing that's always been kind of off-putting about OpenStreetMap. I know there have been other attempts to make a tileset like this, but they never really got enough traction to be an option on the main site.

My suggestions would be as follows:
- Some sort of indication that a road is tolled would be a welcome addition of functionality that the base OSM tileset (and Google Maps for that matter) lacks. The Oklahoma official state map has historically used orange for this, and Kansas uses yellow. Rand McNally and non-OSM Wikipedia/USRD maps use green (probably because green=money) but I would discourage this, since to me tolls are a more restrictive condition, and green is normally used to indicate a permissive situation (and if you are using red for freeways it can cause problems for red-green colorblind users).
- Rather than making the digits smaller on three-digit routes, make the shields wider. Varying font sizes looks visually inconsistent, and the smaller sizes can be hard to read.
- The typeface used for the shields seems to be browser-dependent rather than pre-rendered, as mine doesn't match your screenshot (I have DejaVu instead). I would suggest using CSS to set the typeface to a web font you have tested to fit properly in the shields. Overpass, which is open-source and in Google Fonts, would be a good choice, as it's based on FHWA Series but adjusted for general typography purposes. Sent font-weight to regular/book weight; at such small point sizes the only thing bold accomplishes is making counter spaces mush together.
- We roadgeeks tend to think that having the same shield on the signs and the map is a neat idea, but on a map it can confuse some users, especially when you're on a view with several states visible. It also makes the primary/secondary relationship less intuitive in states that have that when the user is not familiar with the actual shields used. It may be better to go with a consistent legend of circle = primary state route and square = secondary state route.
- If you're committed to making each state unique, squares for Oklahoma probably isn't the way to go, since the defining characteristic of the OK highway shield is the meat cleaver, not the square it's in. I would go with the circle, as that was the state highway shield up until 2006 and still appears on our official maps.

[MoiraPrime]

If you're committed to making each state unique, squares for Oklahoma probably isn't the way to go, since the defining characteristic of the OK highway shield is the meat cleaver, not the square it's in. I would go with the circle, as that was the state highway shield up until 2006 and still appears on our official maps.

Not all of the shields are implemented yet. The square is the generic shield when a custom one isn't added yet.

[SkyPesos]

Really like the ADHS letter indicators on the map. I lose track of which letter is which ADHS route all the time.

[SeriesE]

It would be great if there's a map legend of some sort.

I'm not sure what's the difference between bright solid red and hollow red or dark black and hollow black.

There are also roads that turn from solid black to bright red and there's really no difference in grade between the two segments.

[Scott5114]

Well, it is built on underlying OSM data, after all. Unfortunately, the people that started OSM thought that a British road classification system would be applicable worldwide. It's not. So American OSM editors have to make decisions on how to cram American roads into a British system...and sometimes which road class means what can be kind of arbitrary and inconsistent.

[vdeane]

For whatever reason around Rochester, NY it's showring NY 47 (hasn't existed in decades) and has some random pieces of road with other numbers that don't exist there (like NY 35).

[MoiraPrime]

For whatever reason around Rochester, NY it's showring NY 47 (hasn't existed in decades) and has some random pieces of road with other numbers that don't exist there (like NY 35).

It only renders the data that's in the map. If the data is wrong, you can leave a note on OpenStreetMap.org about it.

[vdeane]

For whatever reason around Rochester, NY it's showring NY 47 (hasn't existed in decades) and has some random pieces of road with other numbers that don't exist there (like NY 35).

It only renders the data that's in the map. If the data is wrong, you can leave a note on OpenStreetMap.org about it.

I'm not seeing those numbers on regular OSM, so I'm not sure where they're coming from.

[english si]

a British system...and sometimes which road class means what can be kind of arbitrary and inconsistent.

It's not even a British system in Britain, where 'highway = trunk' is used for Primary Routes and 'highway = primary' is used for Non-Primary A Roads (that catches a lot of newbies out!).

OSM has tried to make it more accessible to non-British users (and sure, it started off very British-biased). OSM's current render removed the UK style colouring of roads (blue for motorway, green for primary, red for non-primary A, yellow for B, white for other) and made it a scale through orange (annoying a lot of people who had recently griped about Google Map's removing bespoke road colouring of the UK - many of whom transferred to using OSM because of it. Though GM's road mapping style after the change was a lot worse than OSMs).

And it's not like the US was forced into a UK style tagging guidelines, which would be something along the lines of (but not exactly): 'motorway' for interstates, 'trunk' for US highways, 'primary' for primary state routes, 'secondary' for secondary state routes/major county highways. It obviously uses something different...

But hey, from throwing Tea into the Bay to the British guy in a film tending to be a baddie, the blame-Limey game has always been popular in the US. 

[english si]

I like this American-styled render, and, while it's a work in progress, I rather like it.

I really like how it renders all protected areas for the selfish reason that I spent a load of time adding stuff like World Heritage Sites in the UK, and they disappeared from the standard map (The Colne Valley Regional Park never showed, and - several years later - I'm seeing the relation I made rendered for the first time). It does make Westminster look odd though. The Parliament/Abbey WHS is shown as green, but not the big Royal Parks. Edinburgh is covered in them (Conservation Areas, revolving around buildings, rather than anything else. The WHS that is there isn't as I didn't do it, so nobody has bothered).

It shows E road / ADHS routes via their relations, along with other stuff, but not other relation-based route labelling (eg signed tourist routes). I imagine that this is either tagging issues, or just not knowing that there's something that can be rendered.

[Scott5114]

a British system...and sometimes which road class means what can be kind of arbitrary and inconsistent.

It's not even a British system in Britain, where 'highway = trunk' is used for Primary Routes and 'highway = primary' is used for Non-Primary A Roads (that catches a lot of newbies out!).

OSM has tried to make it more accessible to non-British users (and sure, it started off very British-biased). OSM's current render removed the UK style colouring of roads (blue for motorway, green for primary, red for non-primary A, yellow for B, white for other) and made it a scale through orange (annoying a lot of people who had recently griped about Google Map's removing bespoke road colouring of the UK - many of whom transferred to using OSM because of it. Though GM's road mapping style after the change was a lot worse than OSMs).

I'd be very surprised if someone didn't save the code for the old rendering routine and have it running somewhere still spitting out tiles. The nice thing about projects like OSM is because it's all open source, if someone makes a change not everyone likes, someone is usually contrary enough to keep the old version around for years.

Heck, someone could probably do something like what the OP of this thread is doing an make a rendering style that looks just like Ordnance Survey maps.

And it's not like the US was forced into a UK style tagging guidelines, which would be something along the lines of (but not exactly): 'motorway' for interstates, 'trunk' for US highways, 'primary' for primary state routes, 'secondary' for secondary state routes/major county highways. It obviously uses something different...

They weren't...but the problem is that motorway/trunk/primary/secondary isn't really a natural classification scheme for American roads. ("Trunk" in particular trips us up; it's basically unused in American road parlance except for a few states that call all of their highways "trunk highways".)

A while back we were in the situation that all of the main arterials of Oklahoma City and Moore were tagged as one thing and all of the main arterials in Norman were tagged as another as a result of different contributors maintaining each area. Looked really stupid, considering the towns border one another so you'd have roads switching classifications as they crossed the city limit.

Apparently OSM has issued stronger guidance for how American roads should be tagged, as that sort of nonsense has gone away in the last few years.

But hey, from throwing Tea into the Bay to the British guy in a film tending to be a baddie, the blame-Limey game has always been popular in the US. 

Hey, when you live in a house with foundation issues, it's natural to want to blame the builder.

[MoiraPrime]

For whatever reason around Rochester, NY it's showring NY 47 (hasn't existed in decades) and has some random pieces of road with other numbers that don't exist there (like NY 35).

It only renders the data that's in the map. If the data is wrong, you can leave a note on OpenStreetMap.org about it.

I'm not seeing those numbers on regular OSM, so I'm not sure where they're coming from.

Well, to explain it, some renderers use the ref= tag on roads to determine what its route numbers are. The "new and improved" way to do it is to use a relation, which is a way of grouping multiple nodes or ways, and applying tags to all of them. The OSM-Americana style exclusively uses relations for figuring out the route number/network of a route, rather than using the ref key. I've done some searching and can't seem to find the relation causing it though, but there appears to have been a redaction done a few months ago from someone copying other maps... so that could be the culprit, someone copying old maps into OSM... and it has since been removed? Anyways, the live demo uses maptiler which uses a cached copy of the map data rather than the most recent map. If it was indeed removed from the map we'll see it in the next maptiler update.

Edit: Someone found it! It was deleted 25 days ago. The change will make its way to maptiler eventually. https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/12234370/history

It would be great if there's a map legend of some sort.

I'm not sure what's the difference between bright solid red and hollow red or dark black and hollow black.

There are also roads that turn from solid black to bright red and there's really no difference in grade between the two segments.

Alright, so this may require a bit of backstory. OSM uses the british classification system for roads: motorway, trunk, primary, secondary, tertiary, unclassified, and residential. All of these demonstrate the importance of a road except for "motorway" which is strictly based on road quality.

At some point in OSM history, US mappers decided to use trunk as a tag for what Paul Johnson would call "proto motorways". Basically any divided 4 lane highway regardless of speed or access control. This is an issue because trunk is meant to be the most important non-motorway roads (if you take the same general idea of the british classification system and try to translate it over). Trunks are a legal classification in the UK, while in the US the road network is a lot more messy.

Recently mappers got together across the US and slowly state by state decided trunk should be for important long distance connections. So, for example, an ideal state network looking like Mississippi's does. The network of Motorways and Trunk Roads showing the most important city to city routes in a state's network on zoom level 7.


Those roads you're seeing that are dotted or go back and forth between black and the light red are likely in states that haven't or refused changing their definition of trunk to fit this importance classification. Oklahoma and Arkansas for example.

[andrepoiy]

This is a welcome addition! I hope this also covers Canada, as our shields are just as important in road demarcation just like the states.

In Ontario though, I would request that county/regional road shields also be rendered, as the provincial system isn't very expansive in Southern Ontario like it is in other US states and Canadian provinces. (for example, many roads which would be part of a state/province network elsewhere, in Ontario, are instead county/regional roads, even though they have the same relative importance.)


However, I have this map which already shows county/state/interstates for North America. Why not continue this one?

https://kbk.is-a-geek.net/catskills/test4.html?la=43.6192&lo=-79.7820&z=11

[Scott5114]

How exactly does one determine if an intercity route is important enough to be "trunk"? I see the two routes in northwest Oklahoma going to Woodward–how do you decide if the road beyond there into the Panhandle is trunk or not? There are towns in the panhandle, and roads built to access them, but they're smaller than Woodward. Should the roads be trunk or what they are now?

[english si]

I'd be very surprised if someone didn't save the code for the old rendering routine and have it running somewhere still spitting out tiles.

Certainly - Scribblemaps has it, and there's OSM France on Leaflet.

But the point wasn't so much "I miss the UK colour scheme" but "they are trying to make it less British-specific".

Heck, someone could probably do something like what the OP of this thread is doing an make a rendering style that looks just like Ordnance Survey maps.

The contours would be difficult. As would the lawsuit for copyright infringement!

They weren't...but the problem is that motorway/trunk/primary/secondary isn't really a natural classification scheme for American roads. ("Trunk" in particular trips us up; it's basically unused in American road parlance except for a few states that call all of their highways "trunk highways".)

And "secondary" and "tertiary" are not really terms in the UK. Which leaves trunk, primary and motorway - two of which don't tally with their common UK usage in the UK (primary being used the for roads typically referred to as "non primary", in what is a perverse tagging).

The OSM tags for classifying roads are ABSOLUTELY NOT the British system. Barely "loosely based". A "homage", perhaps?

Alright, so this may require a bit of backstory. OSM uses the british classification system for roads: motorway, trunk, primary, secondary, tertiary, unclassified, and residential. All of these demonstrate the importance of a road except for "motorway" which is strictly based on road quality.

No, it uses terms from the British network, adds in secondary and tertiary, but other than motorway (which is a legal classification in the UK, not based on road quality - motorway, not motorway), OSM then uses them differently in the UK.

Trunks are a legal classification in the UK

Indeed, but the OSM term doesn't translate to that legal classification (unlike motorway, which does - in the UK at least). There's trunk roads that are not marked as trunk (eg trunk motorways, and stuff like this road), and non-trunk roads marked as trunk (namely all primary routes...)

[MoiraPrime]

How exactly does one determine if an intercity route is important enough to be "trunk"? I see the two routes in northwest Oklahoma going to Woodward–how do you decide if the road beyond there into the Panhandle is trunk or not? There are towns in the panhandle, and roads built to access them, but they're smaller than Woodward. Should the roads be trunk or what they are now?

Oklahoma is one of those states managed by Paul Johnson who has been resistant to using trunk as an importance based tag. The one exception is that road through the Panhandle which some mappers recently came to consensus on was a trunk route between Tucumcari, NM and Wichita, KS. I don't know if Paul just hasn't noticed, or doesn't care, but usually when people tag anything in Oklahoma in a way that Paul doesn't like, he instantly jumps into the comments of their changesets and gives his opinion.

This is a welcome addition! I hope this also covers Canada, as our shields are just as important in road demarcation just like the states.

In Ontario though, I would request that county/regional road shields also be rendered, as the provincial system isn't very expansive in Southern Ontario like it is in other US states and Canadian provinces. (for example, many roads which would be part of a state/province network elsewhere, in Ontario, are instead county/regional roads, even though they have the same relative importance.)

I believe Canada shields are planned.

Also apparently Canada is about to take inspiration from the new tagging guidance here in the US. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States/2021_Highway_Classification_Guidance#Trunk

[Scott5114]

How exactly does one determine if an intercity route is important enough to be "trunk"? I see the two routes in northwest Oklahoma going to Woodward–how do you decide if the road beyond there into the Panhandle is trunk or not? There are towns in the panhandle, and roads built to access them, but they're smaller than Woodward. Should the roads be trunk or what they are now?

Oklahoma is one of those states managed by Paul Johnson who has been resistant to using trunk as an importance based tag. The one exception is that road through the Panhandle which some mappers recently came to consensus on was a trunk route between Tucumcari, NM and Wichita, KS. I don't know if Paul just hasn't noticed, or doesn't care, but usually when people tag anything in Oklahoma in a way that Paul doesn't like, he instantly jumps into the comments of their changesets and gives his opinion.

Yeah, that sounds like Paul all right. As others have mentioned, he used to be a member here. He later decided to leave and the staff decided it would be be best to enforce his decision based on the way he went about doing it. People like Paul can be a huge stumbling block to any sort of crowdsourced project like a wiki or OSM; we had a few people like that on Wikipedia that were a pain in the ass to deal with. There's really not a good way to handle someone who cares about the project enough to do a whole lot of good work, but also to get so set in their ways they won't accept when everyone made a decision they don't like.

Given that it's the Panhandle, and he's an Oklahoman, I'm guessing he just doesn't care about US-54–nothing that happens in those three counties matters to any true Oklahoman.

[hobsini2]

Great job so far. I am curious about one thing though. When you zoom in closer to an area, some cities are not labeled at all. For example, if you zoom in on Wisconsin, even down to the main city street levels, main places like Manitowoc, West Bend, Beloit, Beaver Dam and Waukesha are not labelled. Yet, Sun Prairie is labelled. Is this a matter of not getting to them yet or is this a certain threshold not met?

I also agree with Scott on needing a distinguishing difference between a tolled highway and a free highway.

[MoiraPrime]

Great job so far. I am curious about one thing though. When you zoom in closer to an area, some cities are not labeled at all. For example, if you zoom in on Wisconsin, even down to the main city street levels, main places like Manitowoc, West Bend, Beloit, Beaver Dam and Waukesha are not labelled. Yet, Sun Prairie is labelled. Is this a matter of not getting to them yet or is this a certain threshold not met?

I also agree with Scott on needing a distinguishing difference between a tolled highway and a free highway.

I will mention that the people working on the map are looking at feedback here. If you want to leave some feedback directly or maybe ask a question, they probably wouldn't mind if you left an issue on the Github page.

[vdeane]

- Some sort of indication that a road is tolled would be a welcome addition of functionality that the base OSM tileset (and Google Maps for that matter) lacks. The Oklahoma official state map has historically used orange for this, and Kansas uses yellow. Rand McNally and non-OSM Wikipedia/USRD maps use green (probably because green=money) but I would discourage this, since to me tolls are a more restrictive condition, and green is normally used to indicate a permissive situation (and if you are using red for freeways it can cause problems for red-green colorblind users).

Green seems to be a very common color for toll roads - practically a cartographic standard at this point.  IIRC, MapQuest used green, as does MapWorks and Jimapco.  I believe Rand McNally and American Map as well, along with whatever my AAA atlas uses.  Places that use red for other freeways (MapQuest, MapWorks) use darker shades of both red and green; I don't know if those are more visible for colorblind people or if it was just a stylistic choice and they didn't think about it.  Jimapco, Rand McNally, American Map, and my AAA atlas use blue for freeways.

Incidentally, Google Maps does show toll roads, at least when zoomed in, but it's subtle.  Freeways have more pale edge lines, while other roads have thicker edge lines.

[Henry]

On Apple Maps, the appropriate shields are shown, which gives it an edge over Google.

- Some sort of indication that a road is tolled would be a welcome addition of functionality that the base OSM tileset (and Google Maps for that matter) lacks. The Oklahoma official state map has historically used orange for this, and Kansas uses yellow. Rand McNally and non-OSM Wikipedia/USRD maps use green (probably because green=money) but I would discourage this, since to me tolls are a more restrictive condition, and green is normally used to indicate a permissive situation (and if you are using red for freeways it can cause problems for red-green colorblind users).

Green seems to be a very common color for toll roads - practically a cartographic standard at this point.  IIRC, MapQuest used green, as does MapWorks and Jimapco.  I believe Rand McNally and American Map as well, along with whatever my AAA atlas uses.  Places that use red for other freeways (MapQuest, MapWorks) use darker shades of both red and green; I don't know if those are more visible for colorblind people or if it was just a stylistic choice and they didn't think about it.  Jimapco, Rand McNally, American Map, and my AAA atlas use blue for freeways.

With RandMcNally, it wasn't always that way. The current scheme has only been around since 1980 or so; before then, if memory serves me correctly, the freeways were marked with a dark green color while toll roads got yellow/gold. And these atlases used black-and-yellow Interstate shields, regardless of whether they were regular or business routes. At least now they include the green shields for the latter classifications.

[ran4sh]

I think that Rand McNally change was made in the mid 90s or so, I've seen an early 90s atlas that used green for free and yellow for toll (with yellow Interstate shields) and by  the 2000 edition it had changed to the current colors.

[Bickendan]

- Some sort of indication that a road is tolled would be a welcome addition of functionality that the base OSM tileset (and Google Maps for that matter) lacks. The Oklahoma official state map has historically used orange for this, and Kansas uses yellow. Rand McNally and non-OSM Wikipedia/USRD maps use green (probably because green=money) but I would discourage this, since to me tolls are a more restrictive condition, and green is normally used to indicate a permissive situation (and if you are using red for freeways it can cause problems for red-green colorblind users).

Green seems to be a very common color for toll roads - practically a cartographic standard at this point.  IIRC, MapQuest used green, as does MapWorks and Jimapco.  I believe Rand McNally and American Map as well, along with whatever my AAA atlas uses.  Places that use red for other freeways (MapQuest, MapWorks) use darker shades of both red and green; I don't know if those are more visible for colorblind people or if it was just a stylistic choice and they didn't think about it.  Jimapco, Rand McNally, American Map, and my AAA atlas use blue for freeways.

Incidentally, Google Maps does show toll roads, at least when zoomed in, but it's subtle.  Freeways have more pale edge lines, while other roads have thicker edge lines.

Since I'm a Thomas Bros. (RIP) proponent, the way they handled tollroads was with a sky blue color. Their freeways, like what's noted in this symbology set, were red, as are their ramps. Surface highways were tan.
They did use green for arteries, but that could run foul of the red-green color blind problem.
At the very least, demarking numbered, surface highways in tan (my preference) or other easy to make out color, cased in black, would help them standout. Whether that's done by the route number tag in OSM or the road classification tag in OSM is another issue. That would alleviate a possible issue of disambiguating whether a road is a highway or not when zoomed out without needing to plaster shields all over the map and possibly obscuring features.
(I'm fine with leaving expressways in uncased red, but on a local level, OR 224 between 99E and I-205 needs to be swapped to that)

Couple of notes: I had to zoom in quite far to see some of state route numbers, rendered shield or placeholder square. Some, like OR 18 and OR 62, actually said 'OR 18' or 'OR 62' in their shield.
US 66 is alive in well in Arizona, it seems. However, US 30 Bypass (30Y) in Portland has a square shield.
LOL, OR 99W showing up on N Interstate Ave... that's a long standing ODOT/PBOT issue though.

[Bickendan]

I think that Rand McNally change was made in the mid 90s or so, I've seen an early 90s atlas that used green for free and yellow for toll (with yellow Interstate shields) and by  the 2000 edition it had changed to the current colors.

I think RMN started switching over after they acquired Thomas Bros.