I attended the State of the Map conference

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70 pointsaltilunium4 comments

Recent and related: State of the Map 2026 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49478401 - Aug 2026 (62 comments)

Street maps are already in a good shape. What's not in a good shape - public transportation software and data - metro, tramway, commuter rails and big railways, buses. For example, OpenMetroMaps[1][2] barely gets any attention. And usually such maps are limited to particular cities or countries. Creating something like MetroMan app that supports so many cities, would be great. There are also Transportr[3][4] or abandoned (it seems?) Transito[5]. More people should collaborate on such projects. So far, most of them tend to be just solo developers.

[1] https://www.openmetromaps.org/

[2] https://github.com/OpenMetroMaps/OpenMetroMaps/

[3] http://transportr.app/

[4] https://github.com/grote/Transportr

[5] https://git.sr.ht/~mil/transito

For public transport, transitous is great https://transitous.org/

Similarly OpenStreetMaps has some sidewalk/pedestrian access layers but as the name suggests is still biased towards the one-to-one assumption that most streets have sidewalks on both sides (and the opposite problem that pedestrian connections without corresponding road connections are often missing). It's improving slowly (as I recall, Apple Maps and Bing Maps have both dumped a lot of data into it in some major cities), but there is still a sense that a more coordinated effort might be nice. Especially in regions like Florida where sidewalks are uncommon and traversing roads is dangerous and pedestrian travel estimates feel wildly unreliable and unsafe, because Florida is always sinking back into a swamp and sidewalks are more difficult to maintain than seas of roads and parking lots.

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