Tracestrack Tile service
Last update: Thursday March 2 2023

Information

Company

Tracestrack is a sole proprietorship (eenmanszaak) registered in the Netherlands (KvK 87031469, VAT NL004347242B39). Its focus is openstreetmap based raster map rendering and hosting.
Our contact information:
Email: info@tracestrack.com
Twitter: @tracestrack

Products

  • Base maps: Carto and Topo
  • Language labels: 18+ languages
  • Route overlays: bus, bicycle, subway and train.
To explore all maps that we offer, please visit Map Explorer.

Why raster maps

Raster maps are mature and easy to support on mobile/desktop apps and websites. With 512px tile size, maps can also be sharp on HD screens. Raster maps can show more details on low zoom than vector. When raster data sources, such as hillshades and satellite data is involved, raster map may also perform better than vector maps.

1. Map Style

Tracestrack Carto style is forked from openstreetmap-carto on Jan 12, 2021. Following is a main list of changes:

Removed rendering

  • Power lines
  • Underground subways

Updated rendering

  • Buildings are visible from Z17
  • Simple 3D buildings
  • Pedestrian areas and ways
  • Simplified footway/cycleway/path
  • Man-made bridges
  • Improved high density highway rendering (e.g. Cairo: See in TracesMap.com)
  • Trees and tree rows

Added rendering

  • City districts: place=borough
  • Sea and ocean: place=seaplace=ocean
  • Aquaculture areas: landuse=aquaculture
  • Tourism attractions: tourism=attraction
  • Busways: highway=busway
  • Solar farms and wind farms: power=plantplant:source=solarplant:source=wind
  • Highway/railway embankment: embankment=yes
  • Government landuse: landuse=governmental landuse=civic_admin landuse=institutional
  • Pitch sport icons: leisure=pitch

Misc

  • Use place:CN for Chinese place names
  • Use correct CJK fonts in Japan and Taiwan
  • Better line breaking for longer CJK place names

Tracestrack Topo style is a hybrid of Carto and OpenTopoMap. It uses the same SRTM data to generate hillshades and countours, which lie on top of Carto style background.

2. Tile Servers

Currently, Tracestrack has three high performance rendering servers and three edge servers.

Our DNS routes traffic to the best available edge servers. There is failover setup to improve availability.
See DNS Checker for real time config.

3. Tile Update Policy

Most of the tiles are prerendered. With limited resources, it is difficult to keep an up-to-date map repository in a short period of time, like OpenStreetMap.org does.

The update mechanism includes three parts:

  1. 2-day updates: based on countries, enabled for "IT, AU, NZ, HU, CN, TW, NL, LU, BE, FR, GB", triggered by map data changes. Only for Carto(base) and default language layer(_-name). Become a paying customer to include another country!
  2. 21-day updates: recently accessed areas.
  3. longer updates (up to six months): non-recently accessed areas.

4. Map Style Updates

We love to make our map style meet users' needs. If you want to render new tags or update current styles, let us know by mentioning @tracestrack on Twitter, or send us an email at info(at)tracestrack.com.

The source code of Tracestrack Carto style is not open. We plan to make it open source in certain moment in future.

We take issues and pull requests from openstreetmap-carto as sources to improve the maps. Following is a list of issues and PRs that influenced Tracestrack Carto style:

  • Fix shop=car_repair label/icon colour mismatch (brown) #4536
  • added rendering of amenity=parcel_locker #4512

5. Artwork Credit

6. Open Source Software and Data Credit

  • Servers: Debian and Ubuntu
  • Database: PostgreSQL and PostGIS
  • Map rendering: mapnik, mod_tile, apache2
  • Map data: © OpenStreetMap contributors
  • Carto Map style: openstreetmap-carto
  • Topo Map style: OpenTopoMap
  • DEM data: SRTM and NASADEM
  • Land cover data: ESA Worldcover
  • Data processing: gdal