Also, I thought that OSM had population cutoffs for these terms, and I’d rather see an exception than a tweaked threshold. If you look at the one you want to promote, is the underlying reality that the number of people who consider that they sort of live there, even if outside some admin polygon, is higher?

Also, city and town are relative. In sparse regions, a place with a hospital and airport is a big deal as you say. That level of people. adjacent to a big city, is not worthy of promotion.

I have long thought that place=foo and admin boundaries are not definitely related even though in most cases they match. The first is the hierarchy of “settlements” which one can determine by ignoring government and seeing where people live, and the second is government. Granted, typically governments are organized around where people live, so in New England there are town centers and town boundaries. But there are also secondary villages within towns, that historically where somewhat separate culturally.

So when putting place= and associating population, is that the population of some admin thing, or does one essentially tile with place= and count population in each polygon?

And then there is quarter/neighborhood as place, which are meant to be sub-parts of city, vs town/village/hamlet which aren’t. So in Acton, MA, it is a town (I think, <50K) in osm-speak, and there is South Acton and West Acton which are not separate by government but which have old town centers. In counting their population, is it removed from Acton’s? I think this situation needs a sub-part of town vs village, as in the modern world admin and locality are messily intertwined.

Also there is place=locality for places that have names but it’s not about people living there, but that can be avoided.

One concept that may be useful from USGS topo maps is the “house omission tint”, which (at 1:25K scale) is about noting to the reader that there are so many houses (small buildings) that they are not shown. I wonder if building omission should be something more adaptive, so that one isolated house is drawn but many are shown as a tint. This is probably hard but I wanted to point you to it.

In general I prefer as much detail as is feasible in terms of buildings, but omitting buildings that fall below some number of pixels seems reasonable. In osmand I find that buildings are omitted too aggressively, but I tend to look at less urban areas.

For rail, I have liked the crosshatch-on-lines style used by USGS. Clearly at lower zoom only the through lines should be shown, but in general I only favor omitting things which cause objectionable clutter.

The thing I’d like to see you tackle is showing unpaved on residential/unclassified and up. Certainly I have driven on roads that I would consider tertiary that are not paved. I realize this is contentious (but don’t really understand why).