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Comment by sydd | Hacker News Reader

While I love OSM the layers are bad UX. Currently the main site ( https://www.openstreetmap.org ) displays 7 layers:

- Standard -- OK, lets say this the universal default. The name is a quite non-descriptive, why not call it roads? Or driving?

- CyclOSM -- Why not call it cycle map? This is some internal project name?

- Cycle map -- duplicate, why does it need 2?

- Transport map -- What kind of transport? Call it "Public Transport".

- Tracestrack Topo -- no idea what this means.

- OVPNKarte -- again no idea. Looks like another public transport map. Why does it need 2?

- Humanitarian -- Here I have really no idea. Is this for disaster relief personnel, so it displays hospitals and such?

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I agree the "what it is for" of each layer could be improved. Digging up the wiki [1], there's (I'm aggregating the content of "significance" and "uniqueness"table):

- Standard: "Attempts to do many things at once (Jack of all trades, master of none)"

- CyclOSM: "Contour lines. Cycle map. World coverage"

- Cycle Map: "Contour lines. "Focuses on bicycle features, shows bicycle routes"

- Transport Map: "Displays routes, and public transport. Roads are not most prominent feature."

- ÖPNVKarte: "Displays routes, and public transport. Roads are not most prominent feature."

- Humanitarian: "Focuses on the developing countries with an emphasis on features related to development and humanitarian work. Good contrasting style in terms of overall colour choices. Terrain shading. Many new/different icons (particularly for basic amenities in developing countries) and more nuanced surface track-type rendering. "

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_tile_layers

OSM presentation configurations are a bit like Linux distributions (only much, much smaller): yes, having more than one causes a lot of seemingly avoidable mental load, but there is little doubt that the design by committee implied by a single version would be much worse.

Give people the option to create, import and export their own on the official site, and a means for browsing a catalog of them. You can infer how good they are (and thus their ranking) by how many interactions are made with the map or something, or just use a rating system that can be done anonymously.

No design by committee, and no random, unclear layers for the average user.

The map on osm.org is leaflet based, pre-rendered png tiles. Each theme is a huge global tile pyramid, and because they are osm and not some random osm redistributor they better have those pyramids refreshed quite frequently. No, you don't simply create a "themehub" platform on the side.

https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/ allows to compare 250 map styles, up to 8 per page (selector is bottom right of page). I'd like to see the snow map, rail infrastructure and power infrastructure map (https://openinframap.org/) added but it'd be overwhelming.

"ÖPNV" (Öffentlicher PersonenNahVerkehr) is the German abbreviation for "public transport". And "Karte" <-> "map"

Default site is primary for mappers.

Thanks for this. Turns out I'm not just stupid.

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