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A cartography professor of mine once advised me to take another career path because cartography was dying; he added, “Google Maps has terrible maps- but no one seems to care.” It heartens me to see in HN comments that some are noticing. A pet peeve of mine is when water bodies go unlabeled. An old-fashioned paper map like the kind inserted in National Geographic mags when I was wee included a breathtaking amount of information, but that requires careful design so element labels don’t overlap etc.

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It's still very much in the early stages, but https://zelonewolf.github.io/openstreetmap-americana/ is a project to build a rendering system that handles details better. It's using OpenStreetMap data in the OpenMapTiles schema, but giving lots of feedback to OMT when something won't work.

(There's some attempt to make things look nice, but the focis is still on capabilities)

Google and most other digital maps are indeed terrible maps. They are fine for a certain kind of navigation task, and great for looking up where the Starbucks nearest your current location is located, but for most other map uses, and certainly for actually getting a picture in your head of where you are or want to go, and how that relates to other things that you know or may want to know, or for thinking about an itinerary or even route that might be other than the shortest or fastest, they are terrible.

OsmAnd is a good option for this. I use it where Google Maps fails, namely layering multiple things, and going hiking.

If something is missing, you can slowly improve the map yourself. I've contributed hundreds of places to OSM in more distant places.

At least in the US, folks seem extremely sensitive to direct prices and are consequently penny-wise and pound-foolish (not in a Vimes's Boots way), where they could've spent an extra 5% or 10% on a better product or service and been happier for it, perhaps even saving more in short-term indirect costs. Even against a "free" product or service, spending $30 or $50 might save multiples in time -- but IME folks are really bad at pricing indirect costs.

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