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Comment by jokteur | Hacker News Reader

In my country, there is an amazing government mandated service called Swiss Topo (https://map.geo.admin.ch), which can be accessed freely. Here are some features:

- detailed maps from 1:10,000 to 1:1,000,000

- hiking routes which are actively maintained. You can create your own hiking routes, and it will estimate the time that it will take to complete them.

- historical data, like historical maps since 1864 and aerial photos

- aeronautical maps, naval charts, geological maps, ...

- basically any kind of data that you can find on maps, such as land registery, water planning, spatial planning, etc.

I am not sure if other countries provide this level of service free of charge. I would be curious to see what other countries offer on this topic.

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NSW, Aus offers SIX Maps: https://six.maps.nsw.gov.au (this offers very good imagery of the NSW areas, better than google)

That's the easy-to-use-maps.

There's also the aus-wide https://nationalmap.gov.au where you get basic satellite maps with the option to add various datasets and even daily maps from Landsat 2A

There's also ELVIS foundation spatial data https://elevation.fsdf.org.au

There's don't really cover hiking trails that much, etc. There's more general purpose mapping applications.

It's also possible to find various topographic maps in static form somewhere on the government sites.

Councils are the ones that provide the hiking trails, etc. so it depends on the locality. The Northern Beaches council for example provides an interactive trails map, but most have static maps.

Wow - very interesting.

Btw: the URL for Six maps is: https://maps.six.nsw.gov.au/

Not sure if it was changed but it took me a few tries to find the right permutation

Thanks for this comment!

How do you view daily maps from Landsat 2A? I couldn't find it in the options on nationalmap.gov.au

Those are all government funded and the data is private, correct?

Here the national land survey bureau (ČÚZK, rough translation) maintains maps in a similar scale to the one you posted. But they were opened only recently (they used to be for sale for pretty high prices) and the bureau haven't built a compelling web interface over them. The current UI [1] is basically just an ArcGIS frontend, with no automatic layer choosing based on zoom level and quite slow at that.

Planning maps are usually unfortunately only held by the responsible subjects (towns and larger administrative blocks), so there's no one map or one format. Most of these maps are at least published in some viewable capacity, though, from what I can tell.

[1]: https://ags.cuzk.cz/geoprohlizec/

swisstopo is really good, but as far as i know, sadly, only some data is open, and not all of it

There's a bit of discussion in `osm_ch` that from March on, the SwissTopo data will be free OpenGovernmentData: https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/swisstopo/free-geodata.htm...

The debate is what 'free' means :)

Oh, this is very interesting. Thank you for the link.

I think some of the questions about what 'free' of charge mean are answered below in the frequently asked questions section.

I know that I dearly miss the French IGN. It’s close to impossible to find decent paper map for hiking in the US.

I've found the Nat Geo waterproof maps to be quite good. Between the "Trails Illustrated" fold-up maps and the "Topographic Trail Guides", the east coast is pretty well covered.

https://www.natgeomaps.com/trail-maps

I also use Gaia GPS as a planning tool. Fiddle with routes on the laptop, then load the relevant map squares on the phone for offline use. It has the NatGeo maps, plus several other sources, available for overlay. With this, my NatGeo paper maps largely become backups.

Have you tried USGS topo maps?

I guess the paper will be out of date, I'm not sure what the new electronic ones do for local and regional trails (I think they would print okay, they just aren't distributed directly on paper).

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