OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles

I'm a bit conflicted with vector tiles. I haven't found a good combination of style and tile generator (schema) that provides the same level of detail as the original raster tiles provide.

The article has screenshots that very much demonstrate this difference. The first screenshot has, for example, a lot of POIs (statues, shops, theaters, viewpoints), highways that are different when they are bridges, different colors for grass vs parks, different line widths for different highways, sports fields, building and neighbourhood names, arrows denoting one-way streets, building parts, stairs, trees, and a lot more.

The second screenshot has none of that, aside from a single trolly station and a single street name (which is also rendered incorrectly).

I've tried a lot of vector styles (all openmaptiles styles, the base protomaps styles, all mapbox styles) and generators (protomaps, openmaptiles, mapbox). None of them come close to the amount of detail as the raster OSM tiles while still being as readable.

I've never found anyone as bothered with this as I am. Vector styles are cool as they zoom and pan very smoothly, and their style is fairly easily editable. But, for any map where you actually want to see map data instead of using it as a base map for your own data, vector maps fall short.

Maybe it is just because of computational limits. I can imagine that displaying the same amount of detail as the OSM raster tiles would require too many resources: both on the client side and for tile generation.

It would be nice if OpenStreetMap would try to mimic their raster style closer, instead of providing just another low contrast, low detail base map. I hope this release of open vector tiles will facilitate more detailed vector maps!

You are basically right. But your framing might be slightly off. The primary advantage in vector tiles for whoever is providing the map is not the small benefits of greater sharpness or flexibility in styling. It's the vast decrease in compute required. Maintaining the infrastructure to generate up to date raster tiles is a pretty serious undertaking.

I once spent a lot of time developing this very detailed style for planning cycle tours: https://stevebennett.me/2015/01/14/cycletour-org-a-better-ma...

I've tried a few times over the years to replicate it using vector tiles. It's pretty challenging to load enough detail into the tiles without hitting the size limits, and the default Mapbox tiles don't containing anything like enough information.

There are workarounds with vector tiles that raster tiles don't have though, like the ability to turn on/off different layers, while still retaining legibility (because labels can still be aware of what is underneath them).