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Comment by ikesau | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, as recommended in the article, StreetComplete[1], which shows incomplete areas on your map and marks them as quests to add to :)

Also recommended, Organic Maps[2], which is an OSM client that's good enough to use as my main map app (in my city, at least)

Final recommendation, this interview[3] with the founder of OpenStreetMap Steve Coast. 3 hours of fascinating insight into the history and future of the project, including how he doesn't think OSM will be relevant for much longer once someone manages to develop a mapping project into their self-driving cars

[1] https://streetcomplete.app/?lang=en [2] https://organicmaps.app/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB9NxbnE1i0

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> including how he doesn't think OSM will be relevant for much longer once someone manages to develop a mapping project into their self-driving cars

As someone who intends to never drive again, this is very funny to me. Cars are very obviously not the future of human transport, self driving or otherwise. They take up an absurd amount of space.

They're very obviously the near to mid term future of transportation for a huge number of people.

> Cars are very obviously not the future of human transport

I wish this were true. However, I'm seeing the trend pointing in the opposite direction almost everywhere. For example, almost every European country has seen a rise in the motorization rate. [1] China is also firmly on the rise, and America remains 80-90% [2]

Given this, I don't expect that OSM has the ability/authority to make a dent in motor vehicle usage rates. I do, however, believe they can take advantage of the way the world exists today to improve open source mapping.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/D...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...

[Not cited, but neet]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27503807

It's more complicated then that. For the U.S.: the urban sprawl and urban planning makes it impossible to not use a car for many people.

The old, European cities have a bigger chance to go carfree. Some are actively working to it (e.g. Paris or Ghent), some are trying (Brussels), others are not even trying (Antwerp).

In the long run, I hope car use will decline (so that only emergency services, nuts services, ...) need one - for the climate, for our health but mostly of all: a carfree city is a pleasant city.

Have a look at https://social.notjustbikes.com/@notjustbikes , who does great videos about it.

I should clarify: if it is our future, our future is grim.

I'm optimistic that anti car efforts will win out in the end as our message spreads and people's quality of life decreases hand in hand with even further trafficization of their lives.

i don't like cars at all and think it's a terrible shame how they've influenced the design of cities, but i think we might still disagree on what future trends will be :)

if you can entertain the idea that in 10 years there will be far more cars with lidar+cameras+gps around (plus the compute to process it all), steve's point is that this data will be very useful for generating real time road maps such that we won't need to rely on a network of pedestrian volunteers to manually update a database whenever a road gets closed for repair or a new condo is built.

Self driving car can drive itself to a remote garage when not needed, and return back to your doorstep when needed - just press a button in your smartphone app five minutes prior.

So they will stop taking space as soon they FSD.

That seems like it'd do little to decrease the amount of space cars take up: It doesn't decrease the amount of traffic (actually, empty cars driving around when they would've been parked before increases traffic), so it doesn't decrease the amount of roads. It doesn't decrease the amount of people driving to businesses, so it doesn't decrease the need for non-residential parking. It probably slightly decreases the footprint of residential parking by making it higher density, though it still must exist nearby and many people are probably still going to want garage space.

It would absolutely decrease the amount of non-residential parking. You will be obliged to direct your car to off-site parking when driving to businesses in urban core. That's the main point.

It will be somewhere in the vicinity so it will only congest local roads, which would be much emptier now that they're not used for parking.

Building the infrastructure sounds more expensive, physically difficult, and politically difficult than expanding bus and train lines.

How do you justify the car option given that public transit objectively takes up less space and is better for the environment?

Because people want that?

In reality, you can do both. You can also do neither. I live in a dense urban core already where it is often convenient to take a bus. But not always - there are those mysterious poles of unavailability. Upgrading it with automatic off-site parking could still free up a lot of street estate.

> Because people want that?

People want to drive without their seatbelts while drunk. Actually, this is one of the few times it's correct to truck out, "if we asked the people what they want, they'd say faster horses." Most Americans have no idea what they're missing in terms of the convenience and comfort of a good public transit system. Instead of being mad at everyone in your city for 40 minutes twice a day, you can relax for 30-45 minutes twice a day while reading a book or taking a nap. And, you can get drunk if you feel like it, and get home cheap anyway.

> But not always - there are those mysterious poles of unavailability.

A better funded public transit system wouldn't have this.

> off-site parking could still free up a lot of street estate

Offsite where? Parking lots? Consider Houston: "off site" aka out of the city is about a hundred miles from the city center. There's no "off site" for many American cities.

Give me a map and I'll find a way for an off-site carousel.

I can see a huge amount of wasted space below freeway interchanges which encircle central Houston. Just build two storey deep FSD offsites below all of these.

US is a weird outlier but many other places already have good public transit. FSD offsite parking they still can explore.

In Taiwan we turned the under-bridge areas into markets, basketball courts, concrete parks (for BBQ or whatever), and skate parks. In Japan they do one better and turned them into full blown malls and shopping areas.

No matter where you want to put a parking lot, there's something better, more beneficial to society, less environmentally damaging, more conducive to a nice place to live, and more capitalistically valuable than the parking lot that can go there instead. And if you want to start talking about drilling holes in the ground to put parking lots, great, let's make them horizontal instead and spend that money on a subway.

Cars are simply a bad solution to moving people, automated or otherwise. Ever hear the story about how they had to take realistic parking lots out of sim city, because they made the game boring? There's a reason for that.

All that does not preclude Taiwan from having a car per 3 people, and that includes infants and the elderly, as the saying goes.

If you have these cars, stop pretending you don't need to handle the traffic. You do.

1 per 3 people? We're at like 2.8 per 10 in Taiwan. If Taiwan had 1 car per 3 people the country would be in permanent gridlock, there's absolutely not enough road infrastructure to handle that. Taipei already experiences near gridlock every single rushhour.

We handle traffic with busses, MRT, docked bicycle rental system, and also the fact that our cities are very dense, with lots of small businesses like restaurants easily accessible from your house within a five minute walk.

I'm arguing to get rid of the cars. Taiwan should do the same, for the record. I mean, the classic image illustrates the point perfectly https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/ there's just no way to justify private cars in a modern era with cities having multi-millions of people.

It's anyway a weird analysis. Keeping up with changes to the street network is more or less easy. POI search data/metadata is the stuff that is missing, is something that provides a lot of value to users, and is not easy to automatically collate.

Street Complete is rather good. I filled in a few details in Hong Kong (come on you lot, the population density there is huge!) recently.

Street numbering is generally quite awful on all maps. Google has made a right old hash of much of my town. It manages to put a hairdresser in the middle of the road on the exit from a pretty large roundabout and a taxi company on a small C17th Methodist cemetery.

The entrance to my own company as shown by Google would involve a multi car pile up thanks to the massive "intelligence" that can't manage multiple requests for a change from someone who is listed at Company House, who uses a 20+ year old Google account with the same name and a company email address with the same, quite uncommon surname, in it. I have tried multiple ways to address getting Google to correct their fucking map. I've even tried simulating their own instructions in my correction attempts.

Go on try it yourself - which little UK company am I MD of? Go and find it and put street view on to see why driving through a railing, pavement and a 20' retaining wall is a bad idea. No, it isn't hard for humans to figure out but it is hard for the clever kiddies at Google to get their algorithms let me fix their fucking map to find the actual entrance and the route to it.

In the UK a postcode can cover something up to 100 properties, as required. My business is in a fairly odd stub of land and has its own postcode. The other property adjacent, within the same plot also has its own postcode.

A fairly large dose of irony is that I do occasionally do reviews for Google and am apparently a guide or some such nonsense and my reviews have 1000's of views. My reviews are treated as gold (and might help or hinder a business) but my attempts to fix a real issue with my own company address is ignored.

Just fixing up street numbering will make a huge difference to navigation but Street Complete covers much, much more. I've also done my best with the paths in my local [edit: sp] park, to describe accessibility and "cyclability" etc.

Funny, I find OSM most useful for all the little walking paths people plot... Way better than Google maps. No car based system will ever be good there.

Street Complete sounds very interesting to me, but it seems like there is no iOS version?

I guess the OSM community is more defaulting to developing for other open platforms because that's what we mostly use ourselves and can test/run the code on, but iOS is in the making:

Pinned ticket "iOS - Planning": https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421

See also the project board: https://github.com/orgs/streetcomplete/projects/1/views/1 showing quite a few things already done, some in progress, and a handful todo or blocked each

No iOS version as the other comment mentioned, but if you want to contribute, try Every Door ( https://every-door.app/ ) for now.

It doesn't have points and badges like Street Complete, but you can easily add/update/fix amenities, update addresses, add info about buildings, and fill in the same data using the "micromapping mode". I started with Street Complete, but now use this for most things.

The Go Map!! editor on iOS recently added StreetComplete-style quests.

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