Larger Cities at low zoom levels

I’ve noticed that the main map displays only a few cities in North America at lower zoom levels, like zoom=4. I’ve tried to see if I can find any particular key/tag values that determine whether a city is displayed or not at that level, but I can’t seem to determine any pattern.

It would be nice to see Vancouver show up on the map with the other major N American cities.

Somewhat related to this, wouldn’t it be useful to have a category something like “metropolis” as a category above “city”? In my area we have a number of cities in the metropolitan Vancouver area. I’d like the lower zoom levels to show the area as Vancouver, instead of a close group of separate cities. As you zoom in, the details could be revealed.

I’m fairly new to OSM, so perhaps there are some features I’m just not aware of.

Cheers,
John

It appears that the rendering of cities is a bit random atm. We recently had a discussion on the Dutch mailinglist about it. It appears that there is no code in osm2pgsl (?) that adds a z-index for each city based on the place= tag. Only the population tag seems to have some effect on the rendering.

The thread translated to English.

I added a population tag last week, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. As someone mentioned in the Dutch thread, it seems the text overlap rules have precedent.

John