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Comment by FlyingSnake | Hacker News Reader

OpenStreetMap >>>>>>>>> Google maps pretty much everywhere in EU (and RoW). I had better data in Harz, Bohemian Switzerland, Girona, Laos, Indian jungles etc which was way better than what Google provides.

I would rather give my data to the qualitatively better option OSM than a controversial foreign firm that has questionable stance on user privacy.

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Really? In my experience (Europe, mostly France/Italy), OpenStreetMap has a lot more details than Google on “long-term features”: roads, (hiking) paths, public toilets and fountains, etc; while Google is a lot better for POIs and restaurants/bars/museums/etc. On a given street, OSM will have the exact position of every tree but not so much about restaurants, while with GM you get their opening hours, ratings, menus, etc. Also, GM has public transports in a lot of cities.

In brand new neighbourhoods, I've also found OSM much better than Google Maps. E.g., lots of new developments in Cambridge were extremely well annotated whereas Google Maps didn't even have streetnames. This is super helpful when you are shopping for a new property.

It's a rare opportunity when I get to map actual new roads. Usually it's filling in details like a trash bin here, a hedge there... roads are a much more important core feature. If you ever spot an unmapped neighborhood, just let me know! ;)

I spot them pretty often in the suburbs and exurbs of American cities. Those areas tend not to have as many active mappers as urban areas, so new subdivisions sometimes go a while before anyone maps them. Even then the first-cut mapping is usually someone not actually there just tracing from the Bing imagery.

When I moved into a new neighbourhood, the street name was on neither map. I've updated both. OSM update was fast. Google took several months to update, even though I had provided official documents as requested. The frustrating thing was that most delivery companies had issues during this time. Also, some online shops didn't consider my address valid.

Yes, I've been in the same situation multiple times! UK postcodes are really fine grained. It's great for tracking buildings, but it's a nightmare when companies do not update their databases.

For those who've not been to the UK before, in urban areas a postcode and a house number are enough to identify a property.

Cambridge is a special case - as I understand, it's the UK's hub for hobbyist mappers, ~all of which use OpenStreetMap as a base.

But google maps will get the opening hours bad more often than not due to COVID changes. And frankly, I am fed up with google - I used to help correcting said hours in the earlier contributor model, but will no longer do so since there is no reason to feed data into that monstrosity that doesn’t give back anything in return to society.

Google Maps has unmatched traffic data accuracy, especially here in India where it has literally hundreds of millions of Android devices moving on roads.

Map data yes, traffic data no. And the latter is quite important for driving.

If we're talking about European cities, traffic data is pretty much secondary due to the ubiquity of public transport.

Dunno about google maps in Germany (cause of German laws) but in Italy, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Austria (all places that i visited in europe and use google maps) i found google maps to be excellent but i didnt use OSM for like last 3 years so cant speak about that :) * And still OSM was a lot better then Apple maps few years ago.

In .cz there's mapy.cz, BTW.

Mapy.cz works globally. It's excellent. Don't have to share anything.

Unfortunately the best feature isn’t global: https://en.mapy.cz/ceskoza100?x=16.7243354&y=49.3595814&z=8

Nicely done. Are there other overlays like this?

Yes, for example https://mapy.cz/cesko or https://mapy.cz/textova

Much appreciated!

Ha in the "textova" map there's a LOT of inside jokes and wordplay, here's what some of the actual placenames are, and some of the meanings in case you don't know the language:

- Stovězov (no idea) = Prague. Update: Ahhh could be "city of a hundred spires"

- Bryncl = Brno (in local hantec dialect)

- Malá videň ("Little Vienna") = Šumperk

- Jo, budě vice! (sort of "Yeh, there'll be more!") - České Budějovice which you might know better as Budweis as in "Budweiser". I feel like there's more to this one I'm mising

- Piveň (mixture of "Pivo"=beer and "Plzeň") = Plzeň, you might know as Pilsen as in Pilsner

- Baťovo Hlavní Město ("Baťa's capital city") = Zlín, original home of the Baťa shoe company

- Koněpůlky (I think horse's ass-cheeks but I've no idea why?) - Pardubice

- Camping - Tábor, which is the Czech word for a camp

You can probably figure out what "voda", "les", "dalnice", "silnice", and "hranice" mean from where they appear all over the map :-)

They’re not really comparable. OSM on its own is basically a database, and an ecosystem with some apps of varying quality built on top.

Google Maps is a standalone end-to-end application with best-in-class POI search, POI metadata, reviews, routing based on live traffic, ETA based on live traffic, etc.

> OSM on its own is basically a database, and an ecosystem with some apps of varying quality built on top.

MapOut is very good, paid but worth it. I tried many others before.

I'd like to use OSM for everything, and while their road mapping is second to none, their POI mapping is lacking and there are no good navigation apps that use OSM data. The best one I've used is Magic Earth but there are some strange design quirks, such as no auto-zoom on the map when navigating by car.

There also comes the issue that OSM in general is not optimized for navigation. Interstate ramps and exits, for instance, are named improperly or not named at all.

May I ask what RoW stands for? Google isn’t being helpful since it’s just the word “row”.

I think they mean "Rest of (the) World"

Republic of Wales

OSM doesn't seem to have public transportation data which makes it useless unless you exclusively use a car.

That'a not true. It may be missing in your area, but it is a core feature of OSM.

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