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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting article, and it makes me realise how lucky I am in the UK with Ordnance Survey maps.

There are Explorer maps (1:25000 scale) and Ranger maps (1:50000 scale) and they are well designed with a huge amount of detail.

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Ordnance Survey maps are fairly well done (as good as other sovereign efforts), but the UK's approach to map licensing has probably hurt the country economically and heavily limited distribution of OS maps. OS is maybe the most antiquated map licensing agency I've ever tried to work with.

In the US, you can get the USGS maps for free. In Switzerland or France, you can get SwissTopo or France IGN in a manageable way for reasonable licensing fees. In Australia, it's a little complex, but you can go province by province and license the maps, sometimes for free. Many, many countries provide high quality maps for free or reasonable fees.

But Ordnance Survey's maps are incredibly expensive to license, hard to administer/govern, and can't be purchased for much less (if less at all) than OS charges in their own (terrible) app. And thus aren't in my app like so many others are.

The US approach to making USGS maps public domain has created enormous economic growth. This is a nice paper on the economics of maps: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.34.1.196

Thanks for your work on Gaia! I’ve been a happy premium user for almost a year now. The US public land maps are invaluable, especially in times like these.

Edit: Just saw your post about bringing Gaia to CarPlay. That’s something I’d always wanted but my car no longer supports it. Bummer. Nice work though!

Edit again: Any chance of getting cellular coverage layers?

Thanks! I made a policy to stop commenting on our roadmap, but I know someone internally is tinkering with a cellular coverage layer and it might get shipped someday ;)

This is all true but it's worth bearing in mind that OS recently made a lot of its mapping data open: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/tools-s....

If you ask me it's probably because their expensive licencing was causing businesses to switch to open alternatives like OSM where possible. My company is generally working towards the latter for this reason as well as the fact that it's a global dataset.

As is typical in the US, the government funded mapping has had its funding slashed over the last 40 years, with private extraction companies (mining, oil, etc) making proprietary maps of their areas of interest. Works out better for the wealthy private sector and for their regulators too. The public interest, however, has been ignored.

For hiking I really like Harvey's British Mountain Maps. The 1:40,000 scale gives usefully more detail than the OS Ranger maps but not as unwieldy as the Explorer maps. They're printed on vinyl so waterproof but much lighter weight than the laminated OS maps.

https://www.harveymaps.co.uk/acatalog/British-Mountain-Map-S...

Maybe stupid question, but doesn't most (western) countries have the equivalent of Ordnance Survey Maps, i.e. government produced decent quality public map set?

I don't know about a general survey of (western) countries, but I would guess yes.

As one datapoint, the Netherlands indeed has this: PDOK[1] is a cooperation between the agency that collects building/plot plans (Kadaster), ministry of internal affairs, ministry of economics and climate, the Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat), and some non-profit called Geonovum. Very few people know of it aside from openstreetmap contributors, since we can get some data from there (not all of it is license-compatible, but things like addresses and buildings are imported), but it's quite comprehensive and has interesting maps like noise levels alongside major roads.

The EU has the INSPIRE project[2], though it's not exactly a map so much as a link to various maps of the member states and agreeing on some common standard to make sure they work when combined.

[1] https://pdok.nl (Dutch)

[2] https://inspire.ec.europa.eu/

“Coming from a country where mapmakers tend to exclude any landscape feature smaller than, say, Pike’s Peak, I am constantly impressed by the richness of detail on the OS 1:25,000 series. They include every wrinkle and divot of the landscape, every barn, milestone, wind pump and tumulus. They distinguish between sand pits and gravel pits and between power lines strung from pylons and power lines strung from poles. This one even included the stone seat on which I sat now. It astounds me to be able to look at a map and know to the square metre where my buttocks are deployed.”

— Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (1997)

USGS maps are the US equivalent and slightly more detailed than he indicates:

https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=38.79182,-105.01797&z=11&b=t...

(That's a tile map, but they were originally available on paper, as described at the linked story)

As usual with Bryson he turns to hyperbole to make a point. The USGS maps are pretty good

They do, but (like OS Maps) many are only updated once every few decades. Which means that they're great for physical features, but lacking when it comes to man made features like paths, bridges, wind shelters etc.

A secondary problem is licensing. Not all mapping agencies allow you to freely or easily download their maps onto a phone or provide enough metadata to allow you to do things like routing etc.

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