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Is Openstreetmap unusable in some places? And very usable in others? (piefed.zip)

submitted 12 hours ago by A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip to c/ask@piefed.social

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Somebody (presumably from the USA) complained about "Open Street Maps just not being as updated as Google." Unreliable.
That got me thinking. I'm from Europe. To me OSM is very reliable.

First of all I haven't had a Google account or regularly used any of their products for over a decade. So I need to ask.

And by Openstreetmap (OSM) I mean the maps themselves that are used by many apps, routing services, and even secondary map providers.

OSM is community-driven. It requires people to actively participate, or at least deliberately install apps that do that I guess, to create maps and keep them up-to-date.

Google Maps is an app. Where do the maps come from? The data they get automatically (from their users; one might claim it's community driven too, lol) and those cars with those weird cameras on top and probably something else. Maybe they even take from OSM.

OSM probably won't ever be able to "see" traffic jams, but apart from that it works very well, gives me a satisfying mapping and navigation experience by car, bike or foot.

And many big professional/official sites rely on OSM.

So, is that not the case in other places in the world, e.g. the USA? How often do you see these Google cars? I haven't seen one in ages. Let's say once a year.

I hope you get the main drive of my question. It's about how certain "alternatives" to Big tech work, and are perceived, in different places around the world, although the Europe-USA comparison is bugging me the most.

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[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 1 points 6 hours ago

The likely problem was that the person went to an area that OSM didn't update often, as there weren't many users in that area. Small cities and countryside are much less likely to be up to date

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

It's going to be difficult to make a statement about the entire world but I would disagree with the statement that OSM is worse than Google in the USA. At least not in the places I have been.

Google's advantage has always been its imagery and routing algorithm. But in terms of the actual map information, OSM is much superior. So I have no idea what this person was talking about. You might need to ask them. The USA is a big place so it's possible somewhere OSM has poor coverage.

[–] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 1 points 11 hours ago

Hm that's good to hear.

I have no idea what this person was talking about.

They said they'd been routed over a road that had been closed for a long time. Not specifying "long time". Somebody else talked about the nearest hospital actually not existing anymore but I think they were just hypothesizing.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

No clue. Here in Germany it's just fine. I've been using OSM data forever and it regularly gets me where I need to go. Also like the bicycle routes. Routing isn't perfect with those, but close enough, considering the proprietary apps aren't perfect either. And with OSM you also get people's favorite illegal mountain bike tracks and all those awesome details.

Only issue I'm having is all the construction work and traffic jams these days, so you really want some live traffic data while navigating the car across cities.

[–] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 1 points 11 hours ago

Agreed (the other EU country I'm talking about is Germany). Hence my question.

[–] flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz 1 points 12 hours ago

A lot of OSM data actually comes from public domain data provided by various governmental entities. So the quality of maps will strongly depend on the availability of such data.
In the US, individual states are responsible for publishing that data, so you will see much variation.

Details about businesses and opening hours are user-generated almost always, so that aspect depends very much on an active community. And of course traffic jams are detected by tracking user phones. OSM will (hopefully) never do that.