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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

Does OSM have bike paths? Does it have bus routes, train schedules? Can it tell you the route to take to get from point A to point B on public transit? Does it know about current closures? Does it search based on info other than address?

I ask because I've been using Google Maps to travel and those features have been invaluable. An offline map is usually missing those features. The schedules are not up to date and searching by context requires data not usually part of map data.

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> Does OSM have bike paths?

Actually, where I live it's OSM which has excellent bike paths and Google Maps which hasn't (posted an example above).

And yes, of course it has bus routes and can route using car mode, walking, bike, public transit. Using applications like Osmand you can do much more complex queries than Google Maps, optimize by time, by length, prefer means of transportation X, etc.

Of course every offline app potentially has the stale data problem, but for me, it's actually OSM with the better data.

YMMV.

> Does OSM have bike paths?

http://www.opencyclemap.org/

> Does it have bus routes, train schedules?

http://www.öpnvkarte.de/

It has the routes, but no it does not have train schedules. Why? Because OpenStreetMap is just a basic map. It is not supposed to have such information. Someone has to write an app that uses the OSM data and then add the schedules.

For example: http://fahrinfo.vbb.de/bin/help.exe/dn?L=vs_mobilitymap&tpl=... (enable checkboxes on the right) - OSM Map Data combined with data from the transport assoziation

Btw. I guess you are from the US? Because good luck finding those schedules in Google Maps outside the US. Germany for example only has trains. No Buse and Tram data.

For what it's worth, Google has extremely good public transport data for Perth, Australia, and it worked quite well for bus & train times when I was in Sweden last year (especially Malmö). So it's not just the US. Google's support probably depends in part on the transport authority providing a timely & accurate data feed of their schedules that Google can use.

Unfortunately, for off road, even though the classification of whether bikes are allowed on a trail can be input, I haven't seen any viewers that show this information. I find it difficult to determine the trail type (single/double track), condition (dirt, pavement), and whether bikes are allowed.

OSM has classification schemes for tagging mountain bike routes http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mountainbike

This might be of interest to you http://openmtbmap.org/

Bus and Tram information was added to Google Maps for Berlin sometime in 2013.

Agreed. I live in NYC, and every corner has been completely mapped, and it's a level playing field for almost every mapping tool that's out there. Google isn't competing on completeness of maps, but rather on transportation data. Subway schedules, route changes/delays, traffic, and construction data all matter a lot more to me than actual geolocation. And in NYC, streetview is enormously helpful.

In many parts of the world, basic mapping data is incomplete, and one tool will have fresher data than the other for cherry picked examles. In another 10 years, we can imagine that mapping will all be relatively similar, and integration is what we'll compare against.

Although, that has its own drawbacks! I got used to google maps telling me about service changes on the subway (it's pretty good about warning about planned service changes), and I found myself getting angry at maps when I found out the PATH had a planned service change that maps didn't warn me about.

Unreasonable, yes, I know - but something worth sharing I thought, since if you get into the realm of "transportation data" it's kinda gotta be all-or-nothing, I think.

There is support for capturing bus routes and a reasonable scheme for bike paths (and bike access, lanes and such). But the data is not necessarily complete. In some areas it will probably beat Google, in other areas not.

> Does OSM have bike paths?

Yep. It even has a cycle specific map view (go to openstreetmap.org, and select Cycle Map from the Layers on the right hand side).

Bus & train scheduled, not so much, since companies don't release that that often.

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