[orillian]

A funny thing about interactive maps while driving. If I'm on my phone and I bring up a road map of the area I'm traveling and I am constantly zooming in and panning the app so that I can see locations around me then the map has failed me.

Landmarks are key to any map, but landmarks that fade in and out of focus are not all that useful. I used to be excited by the prospect of being able to bring up a map of my route and being able to see where I was going on my phone mounted to my dash. But as of late, I've been struggling to find the right zoom level that shows enough detail of the area I'm traveling while showing enough of my route.

On a number of occasions over the last year I've has to pull over and reorient myself on my map due to a failed pan/zoom attempt.

It's funny that this article came out at this time as I've been evaluating ways to mount a larger device (tablet) on my dash as maps on my phone has gotten to be rather cumbersome.

I feel that for the most part the details in this article are accurate, that the attempt by google to make the maps load quicker on mobile have compromised critical details available on the maps.

One of the key areas where this could be addressed is by loading details based on need. For example if I select a travel route between two locations, load more of the details related to that route and reduce the extras that fall outside my concern. Show me roadways that leave my target route, as well as the cities and towns along my route. Making an attempt to provide me the details I need without my need to interact with them as much as possible would be great.

[raldi]

> If I'm on my phone and I bring up a road map of the area I'm traveling and I am constantly zooming in and panning...

What's the actual problem you're trying to solve when you do that?

[basicplus2]

yes I have had a similar experience except needing to zoom in so the Map displays a road name as not all road names are displayed when zoomed out past a certain point.

[chris_wot]

From memory, Open Street Map has layers. I'd be interested in comparing OSM to Google Maps!

[maxerickson]

OpenStreetMap itself has no notion of layers. It has a rather simple data model for geometries and completely freeform tagging (so for example there is no technical enforcement of how a road is labeled a road in the main database). Naturally there is quite a bit of effort to use tags with clear shared meanings, but none of that happens in the database, it's the people building the editors and doing the editing that choose what the tags mean.

Consumers of OSM data generally do perform a data extraction step where the freeform tags are grouped together and perhaps normalized to some extent. So at that point you sort of start to have layers, but different apps will use different systems and rules for that step, so the layers are coming from the app maker, not from OpenStreetMap itself.

[ris]

OpenStreetMap is just a database. It has no concept of layers (except the `layers=` tag used for stacking order of objects e.g. bridges). Products which use OpenStreetMap data are free to apply whatever "layer" abstractions in their UIs they like.

[majewsky]

For a visual comparison, you can look at http://sautter.com/map/