OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles

> Imagery should appear much sharper and switching the language of the labels should become possible.

I expect that to work sub-optimally. Label dimensions are far from guaranteed to stay the same if you change language, and label dimensions interact with map layout, even influencing what to show.

If your labels grow larger, they may end up covering too much of the map or even overlapping. If they grow smaller, users may wonder why a city that was omitted before because of space constraints doesn’t show in the empty space created.

I hate it when city and street names disappear on Google Maps as you zoom in and out. Sometimes a street or business name only appears at one particular zoom level and not higher or lower. Just show the name of every street damnit. I don't care about crowding. Standing at an intersection staring at an unlabelled map is a useless map.

> Just show the name of every street damnit.

But why? Google Maps is not a navigation aid. Its purpose is not to help you know the name of the street you are in. It's a tool for paying customers to steer you towards their shops. If all you need to do is follow a path towards a certain shop, they don't need to show you the names of the streets.

Younger generations are much less likely to navigate by comparing a map to the street names at an intersection. Instead, people navigate by searching for a particular destination and then following the line that the router generates.

When Google Maps is a one-size-fits-all product, you can't blame them for choosing an approach like this. Fortunately, the OSM ecosystem lets you choose (or develop for yourself) whatever approach you prefer.

The starting case is anyway automatic positioning of the labels.

Even on the raster tiles that have been in use for years.

That method just doesn't work in Manhattan, where due to buildings, you're lucky if your GPS is working, much less the compass to tell you which direction to face.

Google Maps is a navigation aid that's also used to sell ads.

People don't open the app to look at the ads. They open it to navigate, and if it can't be used for that purpose they won't open it at all. It is infuriating to me when a Wendy's ad is given more visual importance in color and size on the app than the actual place I want to find. But it doesn't seem to bother a lot of other people. Somewhere further in the direction of more advertisements is a point where a significant number of normal people will stop using Maps as a navigation tool, and somewhere further still is a point where more advertisements will become less profitable and will be rejected by even the developers. But we're nowhere near that point yet.

Until then, I'll keep using a combination of Garmin Explore, OsmAnd, and Maps depending on how much I care about topo data, traffic status, reviews, search results, and ads. I'm setting up an Owntracks so I can replace the Timeline data that they're removing customer access to, and contributing to OpenStreetMap, but still using Maps.

The vast majority of Google Maps users are capable of using A-GPS data, they are not reliant on a clear GPS satellite signal alone. And Google’s A-GPS data for Manhattan is extremely detailed. Again, this makes sense for a one-size-fits-all product like Google Maps.

On a couple recent trips I ran into this when trying to figure out what river I was near / crossing. Multiple times I basically said "lemme get a better tool for this" and flipped to OsmAnd. Google Maps just basically/barely showed there was a channel of water and didn't show the name.

Google doesn't really optimize to show you ads. They're a monopoly and the voting shares are owned by Larry/Sergey; they have no intrinsic motivation to care about anything. If you want to be optimization-brained (don't, it's bad for you) they optimize for metrics that individual people make up and use to get promoted.

They monetize the map other ways, like with the expensive API fees, but I wonder if they really care about it. Whenever I look at it for a few seconds I see something obviously sloppy, like misspelled POI names or people adding fake businesses at their apartment.

Also not to mention while navigating Google Maps stupidly hides all the business names en route. I want to see every single business along my route, damnit, so that I know where I could possibly go to eat or stop for a rest along the way.

The Google Assistant is also the most useless piece of crap ever. "OK Google show me all the businesses on the map" doesn't work, and neither does "OK Google zoom in" for that matter. Most useless UX ever.

> Just show the name of every street damnit

I don't know about every street. But if you zoom in all of the way then yes, every street more than slightly in the viewport should be labeled. I have the same problems with all sorts of things like lakes where you need to find the magic zoom level and map position that reveals the name.

Some things are understandably harder, I don't necessarily need the Country, Province and City in every view of the map. But streets and lakes tend to not have much stuff inside of them so it seems obvious that when zoomed far in they should appear.

Why would you expect the layout algorithm to be significantly different?

It's not that the layout algorithm is different, it's that the algorithm tries to optimize the positions of text labels to get an aesthetically pleasing spacing, while preventing them from overlapping each other.

If you keep the label positions the same, but translate the text, then the layout will have been computed with the wrong bounding boxes, and you will tend to get wrong spacing and unintended overlaps.

And zoom the label font size with the map size. I'm an old guy and cannot read the text on the map. Try to zoom in... the map zooms but the text stays the same size. Maddening.

I don't recall offhand whether it's Apple or Google maps that do this. Maybe both.

That's not good enough, AGPS doesn't work near skyscrapers. The issue isn't that the signal isn't "clear", it's that it reflects off the buildings and the GPS receiver will get a clear but wrong signal.

To correct this you need something like QZSS or accurate models of the buildings to compensate for it.

Or when you zoom in and the names remain tiny and illegible.

The term "A-GPS" in common practice includes also wifi and, as I mentioned, Google's data for this is very detailed in Manhattan, too.

The correction which Apple and Google are taking is anonymous UWB location in a mesh network via Time of Flight (ToF), Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Device-to-Device communication.

Yeah, it doesn't work for this. I've tried it in the last few months and talked to people working on location about it out of curiosity. Not in NYC specifically but in other cities.

Even short buildings have issues here - if you walk down a wide street in Tokyo, which are pretty common and often surrounded by 3-4 story buildings, with the map open and look at it closely, you will often show up on the other side of the street. (Which surprised me, because it's literally why QZSS exists.)

Afaik, the issues with WiFi are that if you're traveling at any speed there isn't much time to do scans, and the position of the WiFi networks themselves isn't clear enough because of multipath (reflections), because it is crowdsourced from other devices that don't have real ground truth locations, and because the other devices gathering info are at different heights above ground or are indoors.

The main advantage of A-GPS with WiFi is that it starts up faster and that it mostly works indoors or when you can't see any satellites.

That is how locations are transmitted for Find My Phone/Device, and how relative close-by positioning works for AirTags and similar, but it's not used to determine absolute locations as far as I know. It would certainly be cool if it did that though.

You might be thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS.

> the algorithm tries to optimize the positions of text labels

Not only that, deciding whether to show a label at all can depend on its size and shape, and if a label deemed important becomes larger that can lead to the decision to not show some map details (in an ideal world)

3GPP Release 16 started the UWB location and position scope while Release 17 finalized the 5GC capability. Perhaps more work is being done there, I haven't been tracking it closely lately.

https://www.3gpp.org/technologies/location-and-positioning

I also hate it! I dont know why they do it, sometimes i zoom in all the way and there is still no street name. Its just silly, who is making these design decisions?

The problem is, i keep using maps because google has the best POI system/database around, and it will take other apps long yo beat it, even apples POIs cant hold up…

Not sure if thats true. I see some people using the blue line, but some dont and instead look for street names, etc.

I also dont think that this is the reason that the street names are often hidden.

Yes. Google Maps is getting to be just as useless as their search engine. These are just some of the ways in which it fails me nowadays:

* Open the app. Instead of getting a map you get, "What's happening nearby" or somesuch. And how to close this changes with every release. I have NEVER in life life EVEN ONCE opened a mapping program because I was simply bored and wanted some other place to go.

* Search for "$name_of_place_or_business in $specific_city". Instead, it gives you all the locations with a similar name near your current location until you massage the query in some way. (It doesn't do this all the time but more than enough to be annoying.)

* Search for the name of a road or intersection in a city. It will instead give you a list of businesses with similar names, or in some cases, having nothing to do with the name you searched for.

* Search for the name of a particular business. Get results for their competitors instead. (Feels illegal.)

* The traffic overlay changed months back so that only interstate traffic is visible at normal zoom levels. Now you have to zoom in WAY too far for the feature to be actually useful on all other roads. Someone is asleep at the wheel at Google. (Pun intended.)

I often use Google Maps to search for PoIs and opening hours since their data is so good, but often once I know where the place is I'll switch over to Apple Maps to navigate (partially because it just feels like Google's doing a lot more creepy tracking).

But yeah, add a third "hell yes" to hating not being able to see street names. I wonder if some of it is cultural differences - the maps apps seem really insistent that I can always see things like highway numbers and route numbers, which we have, but apart from major motorways (e.g. "M2") we don't really use any of those at all and refer to streets by their actual name. I wonder if it's more common to refer to numbered routes more in the US, and the apps are geared that way because of it?

Where can we learn more about the label positioning/enabling algorithms? I'm wondering at what stages of the vector-tile rendering pipeline various actions happen e.g. selecting for a particular language, binding into the tile (single object?), avoiding crowding line geometry, avoiding crowding of other labels, font selection, rasterization, ...

Huh, is that for mesh UWB networks? I would've assumed it was for mmWave cell stations, which I've never once seen in real life.

That's something that REALLY irked me when visiting a new city this past weekend.

We were trying to find somewhere to eat... And a labeled map of the city blocks around us would have been perfect. We didn't really care what kind of food we had, we aren't picky folks... We just wanted to know the options to see what sounded good at the time.

But nope, can't see that either.