> Organic Maps have very beautiful transit lines representation in the style of Transit app's great work.

I've just opened up Chicago in Organic Maps and it isn't anything like Transit app: https://u.ale.sh/omaps-chicago-loop.jpg

It works great for simpler transit systems, but certainly there’s some room for improvement!

Not sure about your harsh comparison. Organic's version is less of a rectangle, but is very lisible as well.

I mean yeah, it is quite good already! But sometimes lines break on stations (see e.g. the green and brown lines on Clark/Lake) and there are some unnecessary intersections (e.g. pink and purple on Washington/Wells – can be avoided by swapping them in in the line “bundle”).

Solving these problems would make the map not just prettier, but also easier to read and understand. Of course, doing this by hand isn't really feasible on Organic’s / OSM’s scale, but the blog post you linked is pretty much a how-to guide that can be implemented in code. I’d love to work on something like that, but don’t really know where to start.

Thanks for bringing this up to hackernews! The challenge for OrganicMaps is to make it privacy preserving and offline usable, which means on device routing and getting as much information on the device as possible.

The referred document concerns the existing static part, it's a rather cumbersome to build it yourself at the moment. There is some routing logic in the app - I think from the Maps.me time - but currently disabled. The idea is to redesign this - in the mentioned ticket - and divide it in static (e.g. stops, routes) and 'live' data (e.g. schedule changes). It requires an efficient infrastructure. It's all volunteer drive. Wanna help, feel free to contribute!

It seems like the serverside resource requirements to help with the privacy preserving aspect (and also to avoid DDoSing the data providers) would be non-trivial for a FOSS project like this.

I was wondering if a torrent-based architecture, where clients share updates with each other would help reduce the load. Any idea if it's been considered or would it just overcomplicate it for the number of clients involved and/or the latency for updates be too much to be of use?

I'm building a server to produce plans and a GTFS API https://github.com/laem/gtfs

Cartes.app is quite like an Organic Maps for the Web. So I don't have any of the offline limitations that you have, but feel free to explore the code if anything looks interesting. The development is in french but the code is mostly in english.