16 December 2011 Map Updates

Hiking Layout

Well for this time the changes  are more visually than on other map changes.

First of all I decided to add besides the easy layout, a special hiking layout. I introduced it because I felt that the easy layout is still showing too much information related to cycling or mtbiking than what one needs as a hiker. The new layout therefore omits all bicycle/mtb related information. So instead of mtbiking, cycling and hiking routes, only hiking routes are shown. Also POI like bikeshops disappear earlier when zooming out. On the other hand hiking routes are shown longer than in the other layouts. There is also no separation on oneway arrows depending on whether you are allowed to cycle against the direction of traffic flow or not and many other little important bits.

Going with this change I show all streets/ways/paths that are part of a hiking route also in zoom resolution 21 – just like before for cycling/mtbiking routes. Effectively this is quite a good step forward also for mtbiking/cycling as the rather important ways are shown when zooming out longer, while footways/paths in cities usually are not affected and disappear much earlier. This also gives a more […]

Map Updates 8. december .2011 —- New countries in the Premium Download section

Upon requests that I got I have added North America to the map downloads. So for everyone who was so nice to donate to Openmtbmap/Velomap and got an account you can now actually get maps from all over the world. Mind though that the quality of the maps in North America, though big in data quantity is not anywhere near to Europe. Most of the data comes from mass imports, some of them not done well, sometimes several import sources conflicting each other. Canada can be downloaded as a single country, US is split up into the following several parts.

us-midwest us-northeast us-pacific us-south us-west

Don't ask me what region is actually covered by which extract. I also don't know if they overlap. I neither have a nice map showing it. As usual I rely here on the extracts from Geofabrik, and they don't offer a download for all of the USA..

Besides to be found in the generally open download section I added central america. Also I added more African countries (Morocco, Libya, Somalia, Tanzania). Geofabrik offers some more countries, but as of now they virtually have no data. Once they have some valuable data I could […]