Roadway footprints

[1ec5]

The current transition to cased roads as you zoom in points strongly in the direction of giving roads a realistic width at higher zoom levels. #372 tracks improving the default; maybe down the line we can even consider tags such as lanes, width, and placement. But these tags can only describe the roadway’s shape so well; the style specification lacks affordances for sophisticated transitions between roadway segments of differing widths, or for tapered segments.

Where area:highway areas have been mapped, we should use them to flesh out the roadway’s footprint at high zoom levels. For example, a roadway area fill layer could sit immediately beneath the road layer, and a roadway area casing layer (also a fill layer, slightly buffered) could sit immediately beneath the road casing layer. Labels, shields, and one-way arrows would continue to be placed as they are today. For visual and code simplicity, we should aim to give most road classifications at these zoom levels the exact same treatment, although some sort of highlighter overlay effect might be useful for certain important classifications or routes. Pedestrian malls would also require some visual distinction: #185.

Pink is essentially an overlay for U.S. Routes.

@BjornRasmussen has helpfully mapped a dense concentration of area:highway areas in the Research Triangle of North Carolina that we can use as a rendering testbed.

[ZeLonewolf]

Areas tagged area:highway are able to be rendered today in planetiler with the new configurable schema option. We could potentially generate a custom layer which could be hosted in order to experiment with this capability. I would be skeptical that we could get highway areas added to openmaptiles on any reasonable timeline.

[1ec5]

There’s a lot of underutilized space at high zoom levels that we could use to make the map more pedestrian-oriented in urban areas, taking inspiration from city guide maps like the ones above. area:highway areas are the main missing piece to get to a minimally viable city guide aesthetic.