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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

At this point I prefer OsmAnd navigation over Google maps.

Maps reliably does stupid things like route through winding residential streets because it thinks that's faster and can obviously be done at the full posted speed limit.

OsmAnd on the other hand builds routes I would build: get on the main road and get close, then get to the destination.

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OsmAnd has the annoying quark of suggesting that I drive off my retaining wall, through some woods, and then across some wetlands, in order to get to the road behind my house, rather than directing me down my long driveway to the road a little further away. This is because the driveway is marked as private in the OpenStreetMap data, because it is private. Obviously I know to just go down my driveway, but anybody trying to get directions to my house would be sent to the incorrect road behind it and then just abandoned. I contacted the OsmAnd folks and was told it was an OSM problem. But other apps using OSM data don't have this issue. I gave up with OsmAnd after that.

You might get better results tagging the driveway as `access=destination`.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:access%3Ddestination

Settings > Driving > Navigation settings > Route parameters > Allow private access

Now you'll be routed through private roads anywhere. It should ignore the private flag if it's directly adjacent to the start or end of a route.

Testing just now, it appears to not route through private roads unless it needs to (e.g. destination is on the private road) when you have that setting on, but it might just heavily down weight it so that if the public route is long enough out of the way, it will use it?

See ndriscoll's answer; but besides that there should at least be a feature to tell your local app that a road in question is not to be considered private for yourself; imagine it telling you to go around a long way instead of cutting through your private driveway road that accesses your parcel from both bottom and top road, when you don't technically have the destination on your parcel (say, going to the neighbors across the bottom street straight from work which has you come by the top street first).

Adding a few avoid road markers might help.

I use osmand for privacy but I think it just emphasises main roads. In Melbourne it always suggests turning off cemetery road west because it doesn't know it's congested and will get me stuck for 20 minutes. And there are some missing slip roads. And navigation constantly fails to start. I wonder, how difficult is it to make minor edits to the map data?

> I wonder, how difficult is it to make minor edits to the map data?

The map data is OpenStreetMap, so you can make edits via the standard OSM methods:

Web: https://ideditor.com/

Local: https://josm.openstreetmap.de/

It's just OpenStreetMap, see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/How_to_contribute

To solve the problem for yourself, you can also long press a road you don't like and select Avoid Road.

To add, a bit complicated, but osm data can be edited with osmium (cpp) or pyosmium (python). Then the edited data can be put into osmandmapcreator to generate the file to use in Osmand. (I used this to route around ALPRs)

If you lower max speed for your chosen transportation method osmand will alter your routing very significantly

I mean, sure? But I don't do that. For city driving OsmAnd makes a sensible route which sticks to main roads whereas Google Maps was getting so bad me and my wife stopped using it because it's choices were bafflingly weird, and would do things like "make 8 turns down residential streets, then obviously make a turn across the busy 4 lane main road you could've already been driving on".

Google Maps for whatever reason routes like a residential street and turn can be negotiated at exactly the speed limit the whole way through.

Not only annoying for the driver, but also for the residents.

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