I am really proud of you, OpenStreetMap. You collected tons of data. Tons and tons of it.
For example, look at the Cologne Zoo in OpenStreetMap:
And this is how it looks like in Google Maps:
A lot of information. Even the locations of the different animals are marked on the map. I love it. I love the fact that you have tons of bike paths that are unavailable in Google Maps. But please don’t show all of this information at once.
If you zoom out of Cologne, you will see what I mean:
Compare that overcrowded mess to the clean Google counterpart:
The Google Map Renderer highlights the important roads and fades out the unimportant onces. Sadly the OpenStreetMap-Renderer doesn’t. A few fixes in the color schemes in the smaller zoom views and a improved rendering of street names should fix this, shouldn’t it? You have tons of data, please make it look good.
I do not find the OSM data rendering that much more distracting.
There are labels missing for the bigger roads (K1, K4, 55 …) for example. So it’s missing details rather that providing too much.
I agree that the colors are more distracting in general but OK.
No, it’s providing too much because you see tons of smaller roads in dark gray. Those are unimportant to get a basic orientation in the city. The color scheme should be changed to a lighter gray to hide those streets and the important streets should get a lighter color to grab more focus to them.
If you play around with the zoom levels you will see that sometimes there are too many street names. And they are not as nicely rendered as the google counterparts.
Just look at the autobahn at the upper left corner in the google rendering. Do you see it in the OpenStreetMap-Version? I don’t. It is hidden by the names of the exits. Those are unimportant in that view.
Btw: another important structural information is also lost. For someone living in cologne, the “Ringe”, the rings around the left part of the city, are important ways to move around by car. They are clearly visible in the google rendering. In the OSM version they are hidden and the main focus there are streets in and out of the city.