OpenStreetMap.org Gets Routing

An anonymous reader writes "Good news for OpenStreetMap: the main website now has A-to-B routing (directions) built in to the homepage! The OSM website offers directions which are powered by third-parties using OSM data, providing car, bike, and foot routing. OpenStreetMap has a saying: 'What gets rendered, gets mapped' – meaning that often you don't notice a bit of data that needs tweaking unless it actually shows up on the map image. It will make OpenStreetMap's data better by creating a virtuous feedback loop."

Comments

Now needs a better phone app

[Allen Zadr]

I've used Navit for phone routing, but it has no way to submit corrections. And the official osm app doesn't do offline routing.

Re:Now needs a better phone app

[Anonymous Coward]

Guessing you're a motorist. For getting from point A to point B by bike, OSM kicks Google's ass. If I ask Google for bike directions it sends me up along a 70mph divided highway with no shoulders. No thanks.

Re:Now needs a better phone app

[NotInHere]

I'm happy with osmand

Re:Now needs a better phone app

[NotInHere]

GoogleMaps will never have a sane license for their maps. When you edit google maps, you perhaps improve their map. But its their map then, not yours anymore. OSM map is everyone's. You instantly have access to all kinds of map data -- google maps will never be as good as OSM here. Want to generate a power grid of europe? if you have the knowledge, its just a command away.

Re:Now needs a better phone app

[RDW]

Google's mapping products have been getting steadily worse for the last couple of years. On a phone, Maps 6 was the last great version, with My Maps and Latitude nicely integrated, half-decent offline caching, and sane road colouring (especially for, e.g., UK users). Now we have a dumbed-down app that's superficially prettier with the currently fashionable low-contrast look that's harder to read, poorer road colouring in various countries, Latitude swallowed by Google+, and My Maps pointlessly spun off into a separate app. The desktop version also has a trendier but largely poorer interface, and although the 'Classic' version remains for the moment, 'migrated' My Maps tracks and locations no longer work properly. Purely for offline use, the Nokia Here maps app is so much better it's embarrassing - on a phone, you can cache an entire country or US state in a form that's fully searchable and routable with turn by turn navigation, and doesn't expire.

Re:Now needs a better phone app

[thetoadwarrior]

I'm not sure why anyone would contribute to Google maps. Who works for one of the world's largest corporations for free?

Re:Now needs a better phone app

[Askmum]

It does not require an internet connection but it has a stupid arbitrary distinction between "city" and "town" where when you search for a place it will first only search in its list of cities and you have to manually select to search further, and the search then becomes painfully slow. As if it's geared towards city users only.
It is a good navigation app, but it suffers from some bad mistakes and unwillingness to correct them. But ok, it's a one-man-job, or so I believe, so it is commendable it is at this level at all.

Re:Now needs a better phone app

[TheRaven64]

Right here, right now, today, OSM believes my location is a country that's at the opposite side of the world from the one I actually am in.

Huh? OSM doesn't know anything about your location. If you're talking about the web page (OSM is a database, the web site is just one view on it), then it will ask your browser for location information if you click on the 'go to my location' button, otherwise it will show you the last location that you looked at. If you're using a mobile application, then it will use your GPS.

That means OSM has fallen at the first hurdle

The first hurdle for you in a map service is that the web page doesn't know your location? Odd. For me, it would be that it didn't allow me to have offline vector maps of a whole country when I'm travelling so that I don't run up roaming charges and here all of the solutions other than OSM fail. I guess it depends on how you use maps...

Re:Now needs a better phone app

[TheRaven64]

Same here. I don't understand the other poster's comment about addresses either - I've had no problem finding directions to a house number when in a country where I definitely don't want to enable data roaming. I have about 2GBs of maps on my phone - they're sufficiently small that I've not bothered deleting them.

Re:Now needs a better phone app

[Baloo Uriza]

Weird thing is, almost everything Waze does, Scout by TeleNav does using open data.

Re:Now needs a better phone app

[blind biker]

And the official osm app doesn't do offline routing.

Just use OSMAnd (the Android Open Street Maps app), which has a GREAT offline routing feature. PLUS it uses ector and not bitmap maps (Google Maps data is transferred as bitmap) so you can set the street font size to what you prefer. This is NOT possible with Google Maps, and likely it never will be. Just read the Google Discussion threads about inaccessibility of Google Maps for visually impaired people.

Re:Now needs a better phone app

[TheRaven64]

You know, it helps if you read the entire sentence before replying.

A decade behind the rest

[wired_parrot]

So OpenStreetMaps is only now adding a basic mapping feature that's been available in other sites for over 10 years now, and somehow we're supposed to get excited about it? To me this is only highlighting how far behind a lot of the open source software is compared to commercially available applications.

Re:A decade behind the rest

[Nicopa]

No. OpenStreetMap is more a data backend and its website is more oriented toward mappers than to regular users (although that is slowly changing). Routing services using OSM have been available for quite some time. OpenStreetMap is already ahead Google in many places where Google has broken and partial information.

Re:A decade behind the rest

[sacrilicious]

You're still allowed to get excited at the fact that it isn't google, so your travel plans remain in a silo separate from that whole thing... that's actually quite a good thing.

Re:A decade behind the rest

[Bite The Pillow]

I added streets to osm and google maps had the data a few weeks later. I know it my osm data because I didn't know one street name, left it as the initial unique identifier, and that's what showed up.

I assume google has a priority list, and uses navteq or the other atlas whatever before osm data, if present. If not, use osm.

Re:A decade behind the rest

[PPH]

It's not about the software but about the data.

That's odd. I've used OSM, converted and downloaded to a Garmin handheld and done routing with it for several years. Yes, there are a lot of data holes to be filled. But once people start doing routing on the web site, they can more easily contribute updates. At least that's what I took away from TFS.

Re:A decade behind the rest

[caseih]

No it certainly doesn't highlight that. As others have mention you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what openstreetmap is. Openstreetmap can enable things that other map providers simply can't, such as quick, crowd-sourced updating of maps in disaster areas, which enables apps to be built quickly for the purposes disaster assistance, emergency planning, as well as routing. In short, OpenStreetMap is a platform, not an app, though they do host apps as well, such as a map viewer and now a route system. Google Maps is a platform too, with routing built on top of that, but few users of Google maps understand the difference (and hence are not likely to need or want to use OpenStreetMap for anything). But Besides that, accurate mapping is something too important to trust solely to proprietary companies who then want to limit access (IE sell access) to what should be public information.

Routing can be based on top of this, and several third-parties do this (osmand is one that worked rather well for me while traveling in a foreign country).

I encourage all slashdotters to update the maps in their neighborhoods. With accurate mapping information, routing based on top of the maps becomes more accurate. It's a win for everyone.

Re:A decade behind the rest

[Baloo Uriza]

Hell, if you go by Google Maps in the midwest, you'd have no idea things have changed and in some cases some entire interstates have moved since the 2000 Census before you encounter it in person. Google Maps is often in worse shape today than OSM was in 2006 outside the 10 biggest metros in the US.

Re:A decade behind the rest

[Baloo Uriza]

As others have mention you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what openstreetmap is. Openstreetmap can enable things that other map providers simply can't, such as quick, crowd-sourced updating of maps in disaster areas

It's rare I actually get to highlight a US example of this, since the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team seems to find it uninteresting, but I managed to source aerial imagery through the OK GIS community and get to mapping tornado damage after the Moore tornado within hours, and OSM was already putting out data to get traffic moving around it rather than through when I 35 went local traffic only for months after the storm.

OSM did progress

[hcs_$reboot]

Comparing OSM with Google Maps, OSM did progress a lot, compared to a couple of years ago. I find more readability in Google maps, but that's maybe only a matter of taste.

Good enough for me

[DrYak]

This website will never be as good as GoogleMaps. It'll never happen. {...} when it comes to actually getting me from point a to point b efficiently and safely I simply want something that works.

In my experience, the quality of maps available on OpenStreetMap is good enough (and sometime even better, they have better bike- and hike- trails, whereas Google concentrate all their efforts in making their maps the best ever for cars).

Navit provides a decent enough routing capability (and comes with extra data, like speed limitations, speed cameras, etc.)

So even if it's not Google-level quality (except for the hike & bike exception mentionned above), it's good enough for me to get around.

Of course, depending on where you live, "your mileage may vary". Here around (central europe), other netizent spend great effort fixing OSM and it has good quality data. (sometime better/more up to date than the paid-for GSM maps of our family car).
Some other place might be better (places that Google doesn't even care covering) or worse (region with less community involved in OSM).

So in other words, for me: I bothered to have a look at OSM, and already works at getting me from point a to point b. (Thanks to the fact that all my a and b points tend to lay in region with online communities paying attention to OSM) (even more when the path between a and b is non-car. Then OSM rocks).

Re:Good enough for me

[drinkypoo]

Of course, depending on where you live, "your mileage may vary". Here around (central europe), other netizent spend great effort fixing OSM and it has good quality data.

I now have a phone with sensitive modern GPS, so if I had a good Android app that would let me contribute without trying hard, I would run it. Is there something like this? If not, is there a project underway to make something like this, to which I might contribute somehow? I would like OSM to be useful in my area.

Re:Good enough for me

[Baloo Uriza]

Osmand~ on the F-Droid market is my preferred choice. Almost overfeatured bike/hike/car nav app that's got the groundwork in place to go transit, motorcycle and large vehicle as well in the future.

Re:OsmAnd

[mrchaotica]

There is a free and a paid version, the difference being the number of maps you can download.

And, if I understand correctly, the F-Droid repository has a free version (named OsmAnd~) with the limitations removed so that it's equivalent to Google Play's paid version.

Re:OsmAnd

[TheRaven64]

Yup. The free version in F-Droid is so nice that I donated to the project. I didn't want to pay to fund a crippled open source version, but after seeing how good the open source version is when built without the limitations, I was very happy to donate (more than the Google Play price) to the project.