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Comment by sparsely | Hacker News Reader

It's always impressive to me that OSM has (or at least exposes) better off road walking data than Google does.

I was very surprised by Google becoming aware of some hiking paths, but I sure would have been pissed if I was sent there in a suit and dress shoes... Walk-able covers a lot of different realities.

I was recently walking on Kinder Scout in the Peak District (UK) and was surprised and quite alarmed to find people up there following Google maps. Many of the "paths" are really just public rights of way, which in Great Britain means you have a right of passage, not that it is necessarily easy or possible in all weathers. One of these goes straight across a bog on top of the plateau with no sign of path in sight.

I suspect all of these "paths" are automated additions to their map, but without the proper accompanying information it is quite irresponsible to show these.

OpenStreetMap has the same problem from time to time. People want to add technical hiking/climbing routes but don't mark them very well and they show up without any differentiation from other trails in various OSM based maps.

Some of us can’t help it.

More than decade ago, I was completely addicted to adding Bay Area trails to OSM. It was a complete greenfield, and incredibly satisfying to see the map of your favorite mountain bike park fill up with trails. (Henry Coe Park is huge!)

There isn’t much to be done anymore locally: somebody even walked all streets of Sunnyvale to annotate the houses with their street number!

But when I hike in a far away place that has unmapped trails, the GPS comes out and the hike becomes a mapping expedition.

Not only that, but he OSM maps of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, USA have trails that the official maps don't have.

Why? Google is a low-quality road map for cars. They don't put much effort into walking. In the OSM community Google is considering a very low bar. We aim to meet or exceed the quality of mapping like Ordnance Survey.

I take the parent comment to mean it's impressive that a community project outperforms one backed by a multi-billion dollar company - i.e. it's a compliment.

Yep! The multi-billion dollar company doesn't see a commerical reason to get good at walking details. Cars are more profitable. So they don't put effort into it.

A goal of OSM is to map _what we want mapped_, not what makes commercial sense to map.

Which is also a reason you'll find rural areas mapped really well in OSM and not at all in Google Maps: Why invest in a place where you cannot run advertisements?

I'm not saying OSM is more complete than Google maps, just that the incentives are different and therefore the coverage is different.

I agree. Both OSM and Sygic are way better navigation apps than Google Maps, even more so if you don't have internet connectivity.

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