Creating Hyper-Accurate Maps from Open-Source Maps and Real-Time Data | Hacker News Reader

Creating Hyper-Accurate Maps from Open-Source Maps and Real-Time Data

eng.lyft.com

113 pointsmaxerickson31 comments

If for nothing else but the sake of their open source contributions, I hope Lyft can find a working business model

Does Lyft not have the same business model as all other ride-sharing companies?

That's the problem - they do

They should open source their platform and provide a variety of online services and also support on running the platform internally, then offer it to the global market of taxi companies, delivery providers and enterprise level car fleets.

Become the Redhat of vehicle logistics.

They'd probably survive and it would also likely kill off Uber.

I think this lunch may have been eaten – Via now has a contract to do routing and location reporting for the NYC school bus system.

> They should open source their platform and provide a variety of online services and also support on running the platform internally, then offer it to the global market of taxi companies, delivery providers and enterprise level car fleets.

While I would appreciate Lyft being a company like that, I suspect that most people won't care whether the taxi-companies use open platforms; and taxi companies would have no incentives to use Lyft's platform when the taxi companies already have their own network.

Selling $5 bills for $1 is, unfortunately, not a business model

That's not what lyft is doing.

While I may not be a fan of Facebook, Uber, and Lyft, I absolutely am a fan of their efforts to contribute back to OSM. Credit where credit due.

Lyft I would say probably fares the best out of that bunch on moral issues; driver treatment notwithstanding. That being said all of these companies have made amazing contributions not just to OSM but to the open source community in general - React has probably brought more people into software development than any existing web framework in history.

> Lyft I would say probably fares the best out of that bunch

I see what you did there.

They have a common enemy dominating the space. They have no choice, otherwise, they'd have taken it.

I wish Uber had a similar model. Their maps think there is a road to my house that does not exist and they waste my time and their partners time sending people down a dead end that takes 5-10min to recover from. Reporting it on the app, the site, etc. goes into a blackhole and nothing gets fixed. I've even been told they use Google Maps, which they don't because Google Maps does not have this bad data point.

> I've even been told they use Google Maps

I could be entirely wrong, but it was my understanding Google Maps data is only used when a passenger is in the car, not when the driver is being dispatched to you (due to a licensing issue).

I wouldn't be so keen. The local OSM mapper communities often find these corporations hard to work with. Lots of half-assed work, non-transparency in communication, doing armchair mapping (without local knowledge).

On the German OSM sub-forum there's a thread about improving OSM with data from Amazon drivers. It's hilarious how incompetent their mappers are and how sloppy their drivers are (e.g. reporting wrong speed limits).

Some of them had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the right thing. Facebook initally dumped a pile of computer vision generated data into OSM, breaking everyone, and didn't tell anyone. It was entirely reverted ( more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856687 ). It took a lot of effort before they'd listen.

To get better at something, you must first suck at it. I believe the OSM oversight and governance model can support accepting contributions (data that would otherwise cost time and money from others to collect and contribute) from technology companies, while still ensuring guardrails exist to prevent poor data quality from being contributed (as exhibiting by Facebook and others working with OSM to ensure data quality contributed is high and it is done in a controlled manner).

There are plenty of people and groups who got good at OSM without making such a sneaky mess. Facebook tried to move fast and break things, and consequences be damned.

Random free idea: Grab image frames from the drivers' Phone camera and use that to figure out if the road exists where OSM doesn't have one. Supplement your own Kalman Filter and update your maps!

https://medium.com/@bluevisionlabs/blue-vision-labs-is-joini...

The way iOS and Android implement image capture, you cannot have an app snap images without showing the viewfinder on the screen. This basically means the driver cannot do anything else except let the app take pictures while driving. Definitely not feasible.

Our first smart phone. Dad just bought it today. Do you have a smart phone?

Given the way that apps like Snapchat do an overlay of the camera image, in theory you could build an entire app over the camera. However it probably isn’t the best idea

Has this changed on Android in recent years? I remember building a Camera app with a smaller-than-fullscreen viewfinder. I believe I got to set the dimensions of the viewfinder myself, making it as arbitrarily small as I wanted (or even optional?). Perhaps I remember incorrectly. I wonder if things changed.

Video chat needs to support a pretty small “viewfinder”, otherwise the other person on the call wouldn’t be visible!

This is definitely false from a technical perspective for iOS, though there may be something in the app review guidelines.

No need for cameras. Use existing vehicle tracking, via driver app GPS. Some phones have poor GPS, so wait until at least 2 vehicles pass the same route.

The issue isn't about missing roads. Most problematic are missing places when searching by business name or wrong/missing address numbers. (I work in the industry) Pelias project helps a lot, but there's still more data + software work to be done.

> Some phones have poor GPS

This is quite the understatement. I used to work for a company selling a personal safety device that paired with your phone and the data we would get back for location on some Android phones was just atrocious. On a large number of older Pixel devices, we’d routinely see location off by a large margin (as in over a mile in the worst cases). Interestingly, we’d see the “real” user location provided with a location accuracy of 100-400ft, then the device would radically jump to a new location (again, sometimes over a mile away) with a location accuracy of <50ft. When you are dispatching help to a person in an emergency, exact location matters!

I saw a great hackathon project (which ended up winning 20K€) based on this, it was quite an interesting project at the time!

What's the metric to be considered "hyper" accurate?

Cool! Now tell me how you'll become a profitable company.

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