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Comment by Knee_Pain | Hacker News Reader

The funniest thing to me is that Google Maps seems to be the "normal person" option and yet only OSM tells me where water fountains are.

Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?

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Probably because 99% of normal people "don't refill their water bottles" (and surely not off of water fountains), just buy bottled water and/or drink when they stop at cafes and restaurants?

Not saying it's good. In fact, it's quite bad and harmful. But it just is.

Nah, it's just that 99% of people aren't so chronically online as to need a web service to find out how to freely drink water in a place with free water drinking infrastructure.

The extremely detailed mapping of drinking water on OSM that the OP alludes to, is more helpful than you assume. If you are cycling or hiking in baking-hot Southern Europe, or wandering through some picturesque villages, there are often springs hidden just off the trail that most people would never spot, if the map didn’t alert people to their presence. Also, with OSM one doesn’t need to be “chronically online” and use a “web service”, because various apps allow using OSM fully offline.

Agree with this. When I was cycling a lot, my summer workouts were planned around functional drinking fountains.

This is in the US even. Working drinking fountains are not as ubiquitous as you might think in a lot of areas.

Well, maybe because I wasn't born there, but they're not always in the most obvious locations to me.

This is very location dependant. In southern Europe there are places where most normal people actually would refill their water at the fountain when going through a town, and I have even faced small queues when the fountain is small but a slightly larger group is refilling bottles. In many small towns you don't even have a shop so buying bottles is not even an option. There's sometimes a local bar / restaurant but if you want to just get water that's a bit overkill.

It's because no one buys ads against water fountains.

Google Maps often misses paths in parks that OSM has. I don't mean obscure trails deep in national forests, I mean paved paths in city parks. Google maps seems optimized for directing people to businesses that might advertise with Google, anything else languishes.

Worse, Google makes it really difficult for government GIS admins to upload the correct data. Last time I looked, if you ever want to update the bike/ped paths (like when a new one is constructed) they want you to upload ONLY the new part. This is really time consuming to extract only the new data, especially if you have multiple paths to update at the same time which are not connected. The sensible thing would be to just upload the entire path network for a city anytime there is an update, but apparently Google does not want you to do this.

Apple Maps is even worse, I don't think they even offer a way to update incorrect data -- not that I've been able to find. And it's super frustrating to use, because Apple Maps does not have a "Bicycle" layer that you can turn on and off to find pathways. They only appear if you plan a route. Totally idiotic.

> Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?

It’s almost like this isn’t a thing folks are actually looking for.

Why is it that whenever somebody comes up with a clear cut and reasonable shortcoming of a big tech product, there's a mass of sycophants that crawl out of the ground to say "nobody wants that, you're just a weirdo"?

Everybody drinks water. It often isn't intuitively obvious where you can find water. Even in city parks, water fountains may not be where you expect but often are where you wouldn't. Google maps also sucks at finding bathrooms. Everybody pisses, even cyborgs.

> Why is it that whenever somebody comes up with a clear cut and reasonable shortcoming of a big tech product

Is it reasonable though?

Sticking to the cyborg larp? I shouldn't need to explain the relevance of water to you twice.

The point isn't the relevance of water, but the relevance of a specific feature to a given app.

Should Google Maps show me every single public bench too in case I need to sit down?

How about if I'm an avid cyclist, should they also show me every single secure railing I can lock my bike against?

I thought to try searching "public toilet" in Copenhagen, which I'm sure is something tourists search for.

It does show a few of them, but it also shows an apartment complex miscategorized as one, and misses several within the city centre. They are shown with various names ("Toilet", "Public toilet", "Public toilet for men", "Public restroom") so I think this is crowdsourced, rather than anything Google has made an effort to map.

Although the interface of https://www.openstreetmap.org/ doesn't have a way to highlight them, other interfaces (phone apps etc) can, and OSM has much better coverage.

Google lets bottle water stands pay money to get shown with a featured pin at a farther zoom level, why would they ever show free water fountains?

Google maps is the poster child of missing common-sense features. Monopolies make bad products. Stop wondering.

I don't care where are water fountains, but what bus/train/metro can I take to go to another place, where is the bus stop. At what time does arrive, and which bus stop do I need to get down.

I can do that only on google maps. Open Street Map does not provide that info. Now I am sure there are some local app I can use for each individual city that works fine. But with google maps I only need to have one app.

As user, that is what is valuable for me. I honestly dont care about how clutter is the interface.

It's annoying, but if you are serious about taking public transit, you really do need to use the apps for whatever city you are in to get accurate information in my experience. Yes, Google Maps will tell you when a bus or metro is coming, but they often get it wrong, claiming that buses that run only on weekdays run on Saturday and so on.

Even if google maps is right, it isn't helpful to how people ride transit. Do you want to ride the 4 or 9 or 99? It doesn't matter, all of them go to where I'm going, but I have to choose when really I should just go to the stop and catch the first bus. This is a real situation for me where I selected the 4, but it turns out that it went by half a block before I reached the stop, and google maps got mad when I got on the 9 even though they both go exactly the same place (by a somewhat different route in between that didn't matter)

I haven't found city specific transit apps any more helpful, but I don't have much experience with them. google maps sucks is terrible for the job though.

Right. Last I tried, it's terribly difficult to get Google maps to show you directions for a bus route you just jumped on (and so it thinks you'll miss if you try to board).

The Transportr app[0], which is Free Software and even on F-Droid, shows public transit directions for a number of cities around the world. There is now a standardized format for transit routing and timetables, and transit authorities freely share it, so for those cities Google has no especial monopoly in that regard.

[0] https://transportr.app/

there is a non-local app that does so for multiple cities:

https://transitapp.com/region#all-regions

I've used it in 2 larger US cities so far, and can vouch for its functionality

For many, many major cities, the app you want is CityMapper, not Google Maps. Far superior for transit.

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