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Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

I try to contribute to OSM whenever I get the chance from my smartphone. I like that others do too; often times it'll give me walking directions through a mall or whatever sometimes shaving 10 minutes off. It's only as good as it's users though, so I encourage more to contribute.

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A strong recommendation here for the StreetComplete app, which makes it really, really easy to contribute: https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete#readme

Agree! Can't be easier than this!

Anything like this for iPhone?

I use OSMAnd and Go Map!! to make edits.

Go Map!! is particularly good for editing, while OSMAnd is a more full-featured map application which also supports editing.

Yeah, I love OSMAnd for that reason. With it, you can add POIs and for more complicated edits that need a bigger screen etc. it's easy to add OSM Notes (which other mappers can then follow up on). Notes I find particularly good when I'm travelling and don't have time or enough knowledge of the area to actually edit the map, but want to help others do so.

Go Map! is indeed a fine app. But it does require some OSM knowledge, like the various tags. In that regard the linked Android app is a lot simpler.

Not for contributing/editing, but for an offline map set with CarPlay, I use Magic Earth.

The routing algorithms are okay though.

That is a great initiative! I just installed the app and contributed some tweaks in my area.

Also, I couldn't find any info on this matter: some quests ask you what number a house is. Wouldn't people find it strange that a random person is standing in front of your house and looking at the number and then types on their smartphone?

AFAIK house numbers are not private info, but still...

you can just apologise for the inconvenience and move on if anything happens, it's not like they can call the police or anything

> it's not like they can call the police or anything

Well, they can. Whether or not the police will bother doing anything can depend on a lot of factors.

Happens to me regularly, especially when I take photos of shop names, opening hour or draw building outlines (on an existing OSM map printout). The more residential the area the more questions. Of the last five questions two knew what OpenStreetMap is so that's progress.

I usually carry a few stickers on me just in case, so people can remember OSM and look it up later (after I explain what I'm doing and say it's a fun community project).

Sadly these maps still have our driveway as a "road."

Years ago I heard that Apple was going to use OSM data for their map app. I contacted OSM to remove our driveway. They did demote our driveway to a "private road" (the best I could do). Luckily, our driveway is not in the Apple maps app. I am still somewhat irritated particularly when I see our driveway in apps like this.

You could sign up for an OSM account (it is free) and edit your driveway so it is no longer a 'road' but is instead labeled as a driveway.

Hopefully you'll make a few more corrections as well, but even if this is the only edit you make, it is a contribution to the whole.

FWIW, OSM lists both my and my neighbors' long driveways as "service roads." (Which isn't an obviously incorrect classification although the actual mapping doesn't seem wholly accurate.)

The proper way to map a private driveway in OSM is `highway=service,service=driveway,access=private`. I can see why you, or a simplistic data consumer, would class that as “service road”

So, as I read it above and in the Wiki, I gather that driveway is a subset of service road? (Actually, in my specific case, it's a little more complicated in that the access to a couple houses and a couple outbuildings are interconnected so it should probably be tagged 'driveway=pipestem' as well.)

Refinement is probably a better word than subset, because it depends on how the data gets used; if someone makes a map that interprets all highway=service the same way, driveways will look just like all the rest. If they interpret service=driveway in addition to highway=service, then they will look different.

I am an OSM contributor and could try to fix it for you, if you give me the location. My email address is in my profile.

Thank you for your kind offer to fix my driveway. I just sent you an email.

That's a bit like complaining your front door is still green. If you don't like what the person before you did, you're in charge of changing it. Power to you ;)

It was probably initially added as part of an import of US Census data (TIGER).

TIGER doesn't have all that much differentiation for minor roads, and the import didn't do anything other than a direct mapping of TIGER classes to specific sets of tags. For unnamed residential streets, it probably should have considered things like length and connectivity to downgrade a bunch of streets/roads.

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