Writing a Vector Tileserver for Osm2streets | Hacker News Reader

Writing a Vector Tileserver for Osm2streets

jakecoppinger.com

80 pointsmaxerickson17 comments

If the creator is here, are you paying for mapbox for this side project? Or do you just fall within the free tier?

I feel like your site is so smooth and really works well.

I wish mapcomplete could work as well but instead it's quite laggy when zooming out a decent amount. https://mapcomplete.osm.be/cyclofix.html?z=13&lat=50.84031&l...

Hello, author here!

https://safecyclingmap.com is currently using Mapbox GL JS because I wanted to tinker with the Mapbox Directions API and geocoding. It also works great with Maplibre GL JS, I've got a branch ready to go: https://github.com/jakecoppinger/safe-cycling-map/tree/mapli...

The replies are also correct - I'm using the CyclOSM tiles (https://www.cyclosm.org), and the lane shapes are generated by osm2streets, which Dustin Carlino (https://github.com/dabreegster) wrote in Rust! (https://github.com/a-b-street/osm2streets).

It's not using Mapbox at all. The lane overlays at close in zooms are being generated on the fly and the background is https://www.cyclosm.org/.

Do you mean that https://safecyclingmap.com/ isn't using Mapbox? Because I see the logo at the bottom right of the website.

it uses mapbox'es renderer (mapbox-gl) and seems to pull in the CSS from mapbox directly. Might be worth changing to maplibre since it's not using mapbox'es tiles.

It uses Mapbox GL JS v2.x, which is no longer open-source and is tied to the TOS, so the distinction of using Mapbox tiles or not doesn't seem to matter. Just loading the library requires a token from Mapbox.

One of the authors of https://github.com/a-b-street/osm2streets here. If you're interested in improving the quality of the lane rendering, please get in touch on the repo! https://a-b-street.github.io/docs/tech/map/geometry/index.ht... is an older, but still relevant, deep-dive into how the geometry is calculated.

Can someone elaborate on the word "slippy" in this context? It seems to refer[0] to maps that can be dragged and zoomed. But isn't that all digital maps?

The first one I've interacted with was Google Maps almost two decades ago, which seems to meet the criteria (as well as every alternative I have tried). So I'm not sure what a non-slippy map would be like (or why the word is a necessary qualifier in this context).

[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_map

Slippy maps is the baseline nowadays but it wasn’t always.

Example video showing terraserver: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uaQNdMQ3NNk

As others mentioned there are also many maps meant for printing. There are also map servers that will generate a viewport-specific image (typically meaning no on-the-fly rendering) on demand.

Author here! I used the world slippy, possibly out of context, to refer to a generic map using remote vector or raster tiles.

Maybe it's easier to define what I don't mean by a "generic slippy map": https://play.abstreet.org/0.3.37/abstreet.html

This website is effectively a very powerful game engine (written in Rust and compiled to wasm) running in the browser - I can't easily add a GeoJSON ovrlay, or geolocation, or other web map patterns.

The "street explorer" demo (https://a-b-street.github.io/osm2streets/#18.37/-33.88071/15...) loads a slippy map (OpenStreetMap) and then loads in a debug segment of the map data.

It's come to mean interactive maps web maps, usually tiled image based. This is still a very specific thing in GIS where most published maps are still static documents - and often meant for printing on large format printers in the ALEC world.

i always associate slippy with draggable or pinch and zoomable, unlike the super annoying maps with arrow navigation and zoom levels.

but i guess as long as it's tiled it's slippy

“Slippy” was coined by the early OpenStreetMap community (specifically Steve Coast, I think) to mean draggable. It was in contrast with the previous generation of webmaps which had buttons for panning N/S/E/W, each of which would trigger a new page load with a new set of tiles.

Post mentioned Google Maps but Apple Maps actually has best lane level details, at least in major US cities.

Apple didn't roll that out in Australia, where the author's located, until yesterday: https://7news.com.au/technology/major-update-to-apple-maps-i...

Yep! Was quite a surprise to see this be released just after I wrote the blog post!

Market pressures from the open source world ;)

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