tl;dr

• water layer min_zoom to d.d rounding (instead of d.dd), so 1.1 instead of 1.11.
• water layer simplify start of zoom 8 config.
• Consider dropping names from small and medium sized water bodies to improve their chance of being merged.
• Drop tiny and small water features at mid zooms
• [ ] roads layer drop properties at low zooms for surface (add surface tag to roads #1197) and access (add access tag to roads, fixes #1273 #1328) tags to the roads. EG we forgot to drop them at low zooms like we do for other tags. Consider dropping access=yes and related tags #1331

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• What did you see? Tile size is too large at zoom 8 (zoom 7 at 512 tile size).
  • With compression in TopoJSON: 2x file size increase
  • With uncompressed GeoJSON: 7/37/48 tile is 13.5 mb to 3.6 mb! (or 3.75x as large!!!)
• What did you expect to see? Smaller tile size, more generalized geoms, less features
• What map location are you having problems with?
  • https://tile.nextzen.org/tilezen/vector/v1/512/all/7/37/48.json?api_key=zxy
  • https://tile.mapzen.com/mapzen/vector/v1/512/all/7/37/48.json?api_key=zxy
  • https://tile.nextzen.org/tilezen/vector/v1/512/all/8/74/97.json?api_key=zxy
  • https://tile.mapzen.com/mapzen/vector/v1/512/all/8/74/97.json?api_key=zxy
• Screenshot? Props for animated gifs.

We did change the NE to OSM switchover in #1359.

So it's expected the feature count be different...

But it seems there are to many features / they have too many names, and their geometries aren't simplified.

At zoom 7 at 512 px tile size in Nextzen build (showing no geom simplification):

Compared to Mapzen build using Natural Earth source (using default NE shapes that are already generalized):

At zoom 8 at 512 px tile size in Nextzen (with generalization):

Compared with zoom 7 at 512 px tile size in Nextzen (no generalization):

/cc @bcamper