Will this take down Big Maps?
1. Address lookups. Many of the buildings in OSM have yet to get street addresses added, so navigating to an address is a bit hit or miss. This gets fixed with time as people update the maps and wouldn't be a show stopper.
2. Real time traffic and detour navigation. This is really needed when navigating around busy cities where a wreck on a major highway can result in significant delays. This needs a combination of an external service (separate from OSM) but also one that has enough adoption to have usable data.
Google has the benefit of having their own street-level imagery for house numbers and street names, Android devices for real-time traffic info, and the ability to simply scrape web pages for shop data including opening hours. but in places with a reasonable number of active mappers, OSM is so much richer and more up to date.
There are cases where a brand might have broken opening hours information such as "Mo- Tu - We 09 00 -4 p m". For alltheplaces.xyz scrapers, a human is often able to make sense of the situation and fix the problem through a few lines of extra code. Contacting the business to get the hours confirmed would only be necessary in very rare cases.
Where it would perhaps make the _most_ sense to contact a business to confirm opening hours is:
1. Ahead of public holidays to confirm planned temporary changes to opening hours. Many brands don't bother to update hours on their websites for such temporary changes, or at least don't list those hours until the week prior, which is usually too late for OSM, ATP, offline maps, etc which would ideally want to know these changes to hours up to a year in advance.
2. To confirm actual dates of permanent store/restaurant closures. Many brands in liquidation tend to fire the website developers (or can't pay them to work) and leave an outdated website online until the final shop or restaurant is closed. Commonly it's only some "CLOSING DOWN SALE LAST DAYS EXTENDED TO FRIDAY" post on social media that informs visitors accurately.
Organic Maps didn’t accept my PR with it…
Almost a year ago, that is SO COOL! I'll be trying CoMaps for store hours now.
Some OSM contributors go brand-by-brand/operator-by-operator in making sure OSM features have the most up-to-date opening hours added to them from matched ATP features. As such, OSM may be fairly accurate for chains too.
For a standalone shop or restaurant the opening hours situation is usually still better with Google Maps rather than OSM. There aren't enough OSM contributors who care enough to check and maintain opening hours for every shop, restaurant, fuel station, etc.
I'm sure it annoys the stores that keep their website and Yelp etc. updated but there is no way to know who is reliable.
I wonder if we can build a decentralized version of such a reporting service.
CoMaps fork is adding OpenAddresses integration and traffic (linked above)!
OpenAddresses is perhaps the gold standard for open source address data compilation from government datasets. Note for the future that alltheplaces.xyz (project I contribute to) is looking like it may eventually perform the automatic address data download/extraction/compilation that OpenAddresses currently performs. This has the benefit that in backwards countries, alltheplaces.xyz also obtains some addresses through other means--such as advertised location of international restaurant chains. And quite often, being within +/- 100 address numbers on a road is good enough for navigation. Google Maps obviously crawls addresses from all over the Internet AND has quite a high tolerance for errors, hence will perhaps always seem more complete than OSM.
2. Some further ideas for open source mapping applications trying to determine real time traffic situations:
2a. Use GTFS/GTFS-RT feeds for bus networks to detect real time delays but also to compare planned bus route schedules for different times of the day (different traffic conditions) where buses share the road with the public. There's already a few maps out there that overlay nearby GTFS-RT feeds for the city of interest and usefully provide a visual indication of how well public transport vehicles are currently moving.
2b. alltheplaces.xyz extracts public traffic camera feeds which could be presented to users when they plan/commence a journey as an indication of what lies ahead on the route.
While not updated as frequently, their releases have a pretty high quality and coverage.
https://github.com/orgs/OvertureMaps/discussions/298
That being said, it's hard to fault them for trying to monetize some dimensions that are not well supplied by the public, and that companies work to acquire. Still, I agree, it's disappointing.