[Aragorn]

At least in my experience trying to ride a bicycle on surface=sand is horrible – I would prefer to ride on a busy road or make ten times longer detour rather than rode on a sand.

Unfortunately, surface=sand, while displayed differently is not easy to spot.

I tried enabling Cycling style in Elevate map style with extended road surfaces enabled.

See for example https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/257032565#map=19/50.19252/21.99158 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/257032564#map=17/50.19030/21.99019 (screenshot below is based on data that has surface tags but not a tracktype tags that I just added).

Note that current style requires zooming in and careful checking what is displayed to spot surface=sand. I think that it is desirable to make it easier.

The same applies to surface=grass_paver, surface=cobblestone and surface=unhewn_cobblestone

[Tobias]

I understand your problem, but the rendering is meant to be like that – to have to zoom in to look for those details. There are only a view immediate characteristics of a track which are immediately visible (like paved/unpaved, tracktype and routes). Extended surface (and some other things) is only secondary, because it would be a bit too much.
One of the main problems here is also the missing tracktype, it would be easier to see the surface information in a correctly tagged track, but don’t forget: and also several different surfaces are shown like sand: ground,dirt,grass,sand,earth,mud,clay,salt,ice,snow – there’s only a limited amount of rendering those things that make sense.

Developer of Elevate mapstyle

[Aragorn]

It is a bit surprising for me that surface=sand and surface=dirt is displayed in the same style for a cycling layer.

There is a massive difference between this two, on correctly tagged surface=dirt one may drive (assuming no extreme slopes, closed access etc) and surface=sand is not rideable.

[Tobias]

Sorry to disappoint you, but we have grouped surface values to make them manageable. There are just too many, and there are just so little possibilities to show them. The rationale for grouping dirt and sand is, that it’s both natural ground (as are the other values above), so it’s pretty easy to know which natural ground by checking the area.
So it might look for you that sand in dirt haven’t a lot in common, but in my point of view a lot more than they have in common with e.g. asphalt, compacted or fine gravel.
BTW, if somehing is rideable is highly subjective – someone with a race bike might find compacted not rideable, someone else might think that wet or hardened sand might work fine.

Developer of Elevate mapstyle

[Aragorn]

I understand, it is impossible to make map style and fit what everybody wants.

Maybe I will try to make my own version (once I finish one of my current projects).

[Author]

Posts