Map background change?

I was reliving a past city, and saw what I thought were a bunch of missed streets, even though I thought I was at 100%.
image

Glad I came across this thread.

And Node Hunter helped too, once I figured out why.

For what it is worth, Wandrer looks like it uses Stadia and the site’s map looks nice.

I noticed this on my phone when was out running earlier trying to see where I was heading next. It is always easy to say change is bad just because you are not used to it but I did find it harder to read.

When doing CS runs I just need a simple view of the streets and indeed what are not by the thinner lines. This one seems a “nice” map to look at but showing things like individual buildings is really just clutter for us. It shows sidewalks/pavements on residential streets which most of the time we don’t need to differentiate. I run in the road if it safe to do so after all.

Also this one has no satellite view which helps when planning a route to see what’s what.

But totally understand maps cost money and you can’t spend more on them than you can afford from our subscriptions.

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PS I must say I do find the streetferret model of map display of just showing streets done in green and ones to do in red with, anything else, not coloured is by far the clearest to see what you need to do.

I don’t like this new background at all. There is just too much details on the map. The old background was quite effective to see the streets you have run or not.

I like CT a lot, and I’ll be willing to pay more to get to the old background.

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Honestly, I’m not loving the new life map. It’s showing too much detail for me, including parking lots and driveways, which makes it too messy and looks like I have a ton of incomplete streets. Preferred the old one.

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Here’s the same view, in the old style:

  • no buildings
  • all streets are white

Am I missing anything else that’s different between our two screenshots?

I’m a bit surprised to see basically the same level of nameless streets. I’m hearing a lot of feedback of non-street items existing on the map with the same weight, but I’m having a difficult time finding good references.
Anyone reading along & sharing your feedback, it would be very helpful if you could share screenshots and note the city/region. It could help me figure out if I can restyle that data as well.

Thank you, everyone, for your feedback - it’s very helpful directly with this issue, as well as giving me a way better view into how you use CityStrides day-to-day.
I’d also like to reiterate that I plan on resolving this in way that makes the site as usable or better for you & if that means going back to :money_with_wings: paying heaps then :man_shrugging: that’s what it’ll be.

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Yeah the more black and white is better but I agree we don’t need all the buildings. Though they go away when you zoom out.
I thought I would screenshot how far in I had to zoom to see the streets to build a route. Then with everything else how hard it is to see. Not as bad on my laptop but I cant always build from there because parking can change and I need to do a quick rebuild.

@tim1 I do like the green and red and simple black and while. But everything on boarders is terrible. It missed soooooo many of my roads. But cool for a back up for what I missed a few connection.

Here’s an example in my city (Carmel, IN). The first image is what it looks like for the base view and as you can see it’s almost impossible to tell which streets count. Most of these are service roads to various businesses. It’s only using node hunter that lets me see the actual streets that count. On the previous style, only the minor and residential roads would show in that thick style, similar to how it looks on OSM in the third image. I feel like without node hunter, it would be very annoying to find the actual streets in this area.



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Thanks for taking the time to take the screenshots! This is very interesting…

Here’s what that view looks like in the old style:

Here’s what I’ve worked out so far with the new provider:

I’m about to ship this version to the live site. It includes a lot of overall style adjustments as well as an attempt at making the street names appear while zoomed out further. This will help with a lot of the feedback so far, mainly:

  • too much info displayed on the map
  • street names not visible until zoomed into the map very closely

I don’t know that this will address the issue of non-street paths displaying too prominently, however I’m still struggling to actually see the issue. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist (based on the names this style editor uses, it suggests it doesn’t know the difference between the two), but I haven’t solidly proven whether I can or cannot fix it. That’ll be the deal-breaker, if/when I can conclusively see it in action.

Update:
I just found out how to differentiate the service/track Way records in this tool. I’m releasing a fix for the issue of non-street paths displaying too prominently right now (refresh your browser). :tada:
I also improved the display of these service roads. It used to look like this:


and now it looks like this:

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Yep, that makes it much easier to differentiate between streets and service type roads! Thank you, sir.

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This is much better! However, I think it has a slight issue since now both service roads and sidewalks look the same. I’m sure my city isn’t the only one with some named service roads (which do count) and the distinction on the map between roads and sidewalks is helpful for routing.

Side note: the toggle lifemap button wasn’t working on the lifemap itself. I had to go to city view to toggle it off for this screenshot.

image

Then is it possible to modify the view for private drives too? West Sherbern Dr in the screenshot is gated and appropriately marked as private in OSM, but appears like any other street at the moment.

Edit: The more I look at the map, I feel like it’s incredibly annoying to read the street names. They were previously a nice black that stuck out, but now they are semi-transparent and blend into the background color.

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What city is this?

Sorry, same city as before: Carmel, IN.

Sidewalks and Parking Aisles should not be in our mapping stack. Compare these maps, I do not stare at my phone while running, but I will need to in order to discern them.

Also note that the toggling of Satellite is not longer available.


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This latest version is looking better and more usable. Thanks for working on it. I use the satellite view quite a bit to figure out where I could maybe park and start my route or find a playground for my girls to play at before or after runs and start there. If we could get that functionality back I’d love it. I mainly use this on mobile as well for what it’s worth.

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I seems like this is a Political Map, within the map itself, political boundaries are not needed. The need to show park and recreational areas is also not needed. This tool is NOT your everyday mapping tool. If you need that, use Google Maps or another tool.

We just need the roads that imported into CS, that’s it, keep it simple.

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For my purposes the “political” boundaries are actually super helpful. It’s nice to see where one city ends and another begins if you are trying to complete streets in one city and not venture into another. It is something previously that I had to have a second browser tab open to view in order to create my routes.

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I give a plus 1 to the ploitical borders. So helpfull to finally see all the borders in the lifemap.
And personal i think this is a big improvement.

What would help is that the blue line around the red nodehunter nodes would be removed

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Same vouch for the county/city borders, I think it’s cool to know where the neighborhoods of my city begin and end on the lifemap without being on the specific city page. I think these new maps have a lot of potential and cool to see the abundance of interactive feedback here - changing the map really brings everyone out.

Can’t wait until satellite view is back though, It’s such a useful and noticeably missing element at the moment!