Abstract: The road selection is a cartographic generalization operation to retain more important parts, or to omit the less important parts, of the linear features representing road network according to the cartographic scale requirement. Many researchers have paid much attention to the approaches to road network selection. This paper gives a comparative analysis of two selection strategies from conceptual and operational level. One strategy is to update the importance of the retained roads after eliminating one road and the other is not to update. The stroke ordering method is used as the road selection method, and length, connectivity, closeness, and betweenness are used to determine the importance of individual strokes. The selection results are evaluated by quantitative measures (including similarity, commission error and omission error), and qualitative visual inspection. The road network of Shenzhen city is used in the experiments. Theoretically, the update after dimination strategy is better than non-update strategy. Empirically, quantitative results shows that the non-update strategy is superior, while qualitative inspection shows that each strategy has its own advantages and disadvantages.