OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of maps: a publicly-available database of spacial information that anyone can edit. We sit down with prolific OSM contributor Jackson Kruger to talk about the best ways to use the data, and how to get comfortable with contributing to the project.
Links
- OpenStreetMap (keep in mind that the map on this website is more of a tech demo than anything)
- There are many clients listed on OSM Apps Catalog, which makes it easy to filter by platform and purpose. Below are some of Jackson and Parker’s recommendations:
- Navigation clients
- OsmAnd: extremely full-featured, but the interface may be intimidating. Android and iOS.
- Organic Maps: a simpler interface, with features that most users will need; probably the closest comparison to Google Maps on this list. Android, iOS, and Linux.
- CoMaps: a recent community fork of Organic Maps. Android and iOS.
- Transit App: combines OSM data for walking and biking with real-time transit data from agencies across the world to give incredibly robust navigation information for those outside a car. Android and iOS.
- Bikemap: exclusively focused on bike routes, imagine that. Android, iOS, and web.
- Editing clients
- Go Map!!: strikes a good balance between letting you do everything you need to be able to do while making it reasonably accessible. iOS and macOS.
- StreetComplete: provides an interface that makes editing easy and gamifies the process. Android.
- Every Door: specializes in editing businesses and points of interest.
- MapComplete: lists a series of themed collections to make it easier to focus your editing efforts. Android and web.
- iD: the default editor built into the OSM website. Web.
- Find more editing clients on the OSM wiki.
- Cool OSM-adjacent projects
- OpenStreetMap Foundation partnering with a utility company in France.
- Details about where OsmAnd gets elevation information, since that is not in the OSM database. Presumably other apps use similar sources.
Attributions
Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, on their website.
This episode was produced by Parker Seaman aka Strongthany, and was hosted, edited, and transcribed by Ian R Buck. Many thanks to Jackson Kruger for coming on the show! We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].
Transcript
[00:00:00] Parker: Like you’ve talked about for the rest of this evening is what is your biggest draw to a map or what is your biggest concern? If it’s accessibility, there is a project that focuses on that. If it’s historical archiving or mapping, there is a project for that. You have your…
[00:00:18] Jackson: A separate project, but yeah.
[00:00:20] Parker: A separate project. I know you know a ton about this project.
[00:00:23] Jackson: I’m sorry.
[00:00:26] Parker: No, you’re fine. It shows how well educated and researched you are experienced at the very least. You are on this project.
[00:00:30] Ian: Parker, stop flirting with the guest.
[00:00:34] Parker: You’re just mad I’m not flirting with you. [laughter]
[00:00:40] Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn Podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful Uptown, Minneapolis, Minnesota, I am your host, Ian R Buck. A very common experience among people who start bike commuting is suddenly finding out that the navigation tools they’re used to for driving don’t do so well for bike directions. But what if you could leverage the wisdom of your local community to improve the quality of the information in your phone’s map app? That’s the idea behind OpenStreetMap, a publicly-available database that anyone can edit. This topic comes to us thanks to Parker Seaman, producer extraordinaire. He grabbed one of the most prolific OSM editors in our area, Jackson Kruger to talk about it. Parker, what got you interested in doing this topic for an episode?
[00:01:53] Parker: I got to thinking about how OpenStreetMap has a lot of intersections with urbanism.
[00:01:59] Ian: Yeah, intersections.
[00:02:02] Parker: And thought it would be a pretty good topic to bring to all of our listeners so that they can find ways to get engaged with this. And honestly, the thing that got me really thinking about it is how I met my friend and our guest today, Jackson, through it. Jackson, do you want to give us a quick overview of how we got to meet each other?
[00:02:22] Jackson: Yeah, we were going to a Neighbors for More Neighbors event. Well, we didn’t know each other then. We were both going to that event.
[00:02:30] Parker: We both got off at the bus at the same time. After getting off the bus, you looked at me and went,
[00:02:36] Jackson: Do I know you?
[00:02:37] Parker: Yeah, I’m like, “are you going to the Neighbors event?” You went, “yeah.” And I was like, we’ve probably seen each other at a thing. So we got to talking from that. And from talking there, I mentioned my username for all of my stuff, Strongthany. And you go, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen you on OpenStreetMap.” And I’m like, “Oh, you know what OpenStreetMap is.” And we got to talking about how you’ve found that and how you’ve been involved with that. And since then, it’s been kind of this little thing in the back of my brain thinking that OpenStreetMap provides an opportunity as a lot of other things do, if not directly, but as a way to find community and engage with your community in a very personal way. So I took that to Ian and suggested it and you went, “what’s OpenStreetMap?”
[00:03:25] Ian: Did I?
[00:03:26] Parker: Pretty much.
[00:03:27] Ian: I feel like I have been aware of OpenStreetMap for a long time. And as with so many other things that are in the open source kind of realm, it’s been an aspirational, “ah, I love the idea of this thing and I want to use it a bunch. And I just don’t quite know how to slot it into my life, how to make it work for me.” So that’s what I’m hoping to get out of this episode for sure, is I want to learn more about how I can integrate this into my life, hopefully as a contributor, but also just like to be able to utilize that data set that’s out there.
[00:04:11] Jackson: As a person who goes places.
[00:04:13] Ian: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:04:14] Parker: Who goes places and is places and sees things. So what is your current interpretation of what OpenStreetMap is?
[00:04:22] Ian: I’ve always thought of it as like, it’s the Wikipedia of mapping. And I’m curious to know how accurate of a sentiment that is.
[00:04:32] Jackson: That’s pretty close to it, yeah. I think one of the most important differences with Wikipedia is that OpenStreetMap is at its heart the map database. Whereas Wikipedia is kind of the client, it’s the information it’s all there, it’s just an internet page you go to. Whereas OpenStreetMap is a database and then you have separate apps or things that interact with it. But otherwise it’s a very similar philosophy where the community contributes all the information that’s on OpenStreetMap. And it’s there free for use by pretty much anyone.
[00:05:05] Ian: I’m imagining how much harder Wikipedia would have had like trying to get mass adoption if it was just a bunch of XML files.
[00:05:14] Jackson: Yeah, exactly.
[00:05:15] Parker: And you can see that in like the adoption of OpenStreetMap versus you know other mapping tools is that it doesn’t market itself first and foremost as a mapping tool like Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze or whatever sort of thing.
[00:05:28] Ian: Not a consumer facing wise.
[00:05:29] Parker: Exactly. Like there is if you go to OpenStreetMap.org you’ll be shown a map and you’ll have a search bar in the thing to look up an address and you can route a map via walking or biking or car. But that’s not like the main product offering.
[00:05:48] Jackon: That website is fundamentally a tech demo and it’s a frequent point of confusion because people think that’s all there is to OpenStreetMap but really it’s just showing one window into the data that’s there and there’s countless others.
[00:06:00] Parker: And given that it is a very open and accessible database there is a lot of different windows to get into it. That’s just the one that the OpenStreetMap Foundation runs and maintains and stuff themselves. There are plenty of client applications out there.
[00:06:19] Jackson: Countless.
[00:06:19] Ian: So yeah let’s start there because that is my biggest like piece of interest is when I’m like out and about with my phone and you know up until a few years ago I was defaulting to using Google Maps for you know routing around on bicycle stuff and getting more and more frustrated with the fact that like Google Maps just absolutely refuses to acknowledge the possibility of using desire paths for example or like you know anything that could be construed as like an illegal way to bicycle around that’s probably a liability thing for Google you know but it’s when you have a community-driven database I’m like I have more hope that there will be those kinds of acknowledgments that like yeah you can get off your bike and walk it for this section. So yeah do you two have recommendations for like apps on Android or iOS you know if I’m on my desktop what should I like what portals should I be using for this?
[00:07:26] Parker: I think the well Jackson you should talk about how you got involved in OpenStreetMap because that provides a really good connection to like what Ian’s talking about.
[00:07:34] Jackson: Sure yeah I was similarly I defaulted to using Google Maps for everything but I started biking around the city more and there was I don’t remember where I was going from or to but it was I was going south right next to Bryant Ave and it wanted me to take I think Aldrich or something but I’m like why wouldn’t I bike on Bryant? Bryant’s beautiful and I looked and Google didn’t seem to know that Bryant was this wonderful protected bike lane.
[00:07:58] Ian: And even today I think it knows that it’s a bicycle route but there’s one spot right at Bryant and Franklin where it doesn’t know that you are allowed to bike through because-
[00:08:08] Parker: Oh it has that median.
[00:08:09] Ian: -you cannot drive through.
[00:08:12] Jackson: Exactly and I was frustrated with that and you know I have an undercurrent of resentment of corporations so I’d looked around for other mapping applications and found one called BikeMap I’d had that recommended to me by a friend and I started using that it was good at you could prioritize how much you wanted to stay on safe cycle paths you can kind of say I’m willing to take a big detour to stay safe or less you can kind of dial that in and then some at some point I found some inconsistency with its suggestion I was confused at why it was routing me a certain way and I learned that it’s based on OpenStreetMap data and was able to go and look at what there in the data was and contribute to update OpenStreetMap to better reflect reality.
[00:09:03] Ian: Nice, and so that’s something that you have been benefiting from like that that route is actually fixed now and you didn’t have to go through the corporate overlords for confirmation.
[00:09:14] Jackson: I will say sometimes it can take a while for that to become visible to you right because it’s kind of this database model every app kind of updates at their own intervals some… like one of the one example of an app that uses OpenStreetMap data is Pokemon Go, its whole map is based on OpenStreetMap but they only update once a year maybe once every two years.
[00:09:39] Ian: Which is probably fine because they’re not doing routing you know?
[00:09:42] Jackson: Right, yeah but it can still vary from app to app and so you won’t know when you’ll see your change actually reflected in the app you’re using.
[00:09:50] Parker: That does sound like a you know a trade-off of with getting changes like that applied to of if you make a change in Google Maps (because you can contribute as a community thing of Google Maps but then it has to get approved by Google themselves) and there might be some layers of detachment from community or local knowledge type thing whereas most the time with OpenStreetMaps you have people who are in the area who are also doing editing and mapping and can say yes I am also in the area I saw that this pothole got fixed or this construction area got done or yes I saw that this business opened up here and it can get approved much more locally or discrepancies can get noticed much easier.
[00:10:38] Ian: So in your experience like what level of granularity can we expect from that you’re like like like fast moving in terms of like okay if you see the sidewalk outside of my building you know was like closed for a month because somebody was doing like you know a project in there you know and they had to tear up whatever, you know, versus like the the Midtown Greenway you know is like okay it’s going to be like closed for three days because there’s some weird thing going on and then it’s going to be open again and then it’s you know like you know and like… how how are there some apps that are do like what level of of you know speed do you look for in that kind of thing?
[00:11:24] Jackson: Yeah you have to be careful with with updates like that for when things are under construction because you don’t know when various apps or or clients will update their OpenStreetMap data and so if you’re not careful you might say you know the Midtown Greenway is closed and then an app pulls their data once that you know for their one time that year and then it opens up a couple days later but in the meantime everyone using that app doesn’t see that yeah so that’s there are there are ways to indicate that within the map but they’re a little bit more complicated and so if it’s a short term thing a couple weeks usually you just kind of leave it it’s understood that generally things won’t be quite as live or real time as say Apple Maps or Google Maps which is a bit unfortunate but…
[00:12:12] Ian: I mean, Google Maps has never ever had like live information for bike for bike stuff anyway.
[00:12:18] Parker: There are apps that do offer that service of like a live updating one the one that comes to mind is called OsmAnd and their thing is if you use it for you can use it for free it’s open apps open source have a great time whatever area you want a map for you download that map and then you can manually update that map whenever you want. If you want live updates with like I don’t remember how frequently it pulls but…
[00:12:44] Jackson: They claim minutely. I’m not convinced. But it can get very fast.
[00:12:52] Parker: Much faster than you can manually. You can pay a subscription or a one time fee and get their online version which you know you’re you’re paying for the the server time that they’re paying for to make the app available and development costs and stuff.
[00:13:10] Jackson: Yeah we haven’t actually talked about the you know the the main clients that people would interact with.
[00:13:15] Parker: Yeah because there’s like I said there’s openstreetmap.org but you said like that’s just a tech demo.
[00:13:20] Jackson: That’s a demo. The the main two apps, you touched on one is OsmAnd; that’s a pretty well established one.
[00:13:27] Parker: Is that on Android and iOS?
[00:13:31] Jackson: I believe so. It’s pretty good, it’s got, it’s one of those apps that has all the power which means the interface is a bit a bit all over. It can be a little bit intimidating. But it can do a lot of things, you can configure it just how you like it and that is all OpenStreetMap data. The other kind of main one would be Organic Maps or it’s recent fork CoMaps. And it’s it’s a little bit more user friendly not quite as capable of doing as many things. They’re both free and pretty straightforward to get started with.
[00:14:05] Ian: Yeah and we will definitely have links to all of these in the show notes so don’t don’t feel too intimidated with trying to you know search around and find the right one. What like what’s your daily driver? What is you know what do you have installed on your phone or on your desktop or whatever?
[00:14:25] Jackson: All of them.
[00:14:27] Ian: Oh great. Hey Parker, which ones do you have installed?
[00:14:29] Jackson: But but I’ll say the one that I go to the most um that I haven’t mentioned yet is Transit App which I imagine okay many listeners use and because it’s really great for public transit. It is its under- its fundamental maps and routing are based on OpenStreetMap and then they mix that with live uh transit data from the transit agencies. And so any bike routing that you’re doing within transit app that’s using OpenStreetMap data. And so that’s that’s my first go to because it’s a really nice interface it’s pretty good about selecting safe routes when you’re biking and it it tells you you know which parts are in bike lanes which you might have to jump onto a busy road for.
[00:15:08] Ian: And it and it does allow for like “yeah dismount your bike and walk it for a couple blocks contra flow to like the street.”
[00:15:19] Parker: For not getting too into the weeds, I do love OsmAnd. I’m also very much the kind of person to get very into the weeds of like an app like that that has a lot of bells and whistles. I think the best jumping off point for getting started is Organic Maps or what was the other one called? CoMaps, it’s a recent fork the the intake is more involved than Google Maps in that you download the map for the area that you want to be routing in. Once it’s downloaded though, it’s pretty much just tell where you start where you want to go and it will route you there, no problem.
[00:15:51] Jackson: And that can be a major advantage of these is that a lot of them are offline first which means that if you’re traveling and you’re not sure if you’re going to have service somewhere you can download the map of the area ahead of time. I know you can do that in Apple Maps and Google Maps too but it’s there by default and it’s a really nice baseline of you’ll have that data and you’ll have the map.
[00:16:12] Ian: Yeah now I feel very vindicated knowing that I have actually been using OpenStreetMap’s data without even knowing it.
[00:16:17] Parker: It’s all around most people don’t know it.
[00:16:23] Ian: But now that I know that I’m like well I’m not contributing back to the project right like I don’t have a client on my phone that makes it easy for me to you know submit edits for things that I notice in the world around me so what is your what’s your approach what’s your go to for that?
[00:16:45] Jackson: Yeah it’ll depend on whether you have iOS or Android and prefer on your phone; if you like desktop there are other options there. On iOS, Go Map!! with two exclamation marks.
[00:16:56] Parker: Exciting, it’s very excited.
[00:16:57] Jackson: Go Map!! It’s really really good it’s a very it’s a really good editor that runs well and it strikes a good balance between letting you do everything you need to be able to do while making it reasonably accessible. On Android the best entry like starting OpenStreetMap thing would be StreetComplete. It’s a really fantastic editor that kind of gamified contributing to OpenStreetMap where you get trophies and awards for doing so many contributions and you unlock new things and that makes it really accessible that they have it really well polished to where you don’t have to worry too much about the nitty gritty details of how things are tagged with an OpenStreetMmap right because the way information being added works is that you add a feature say and a feature is something like a road or a building or something like that, right? Jackson’s giving me looks that I’m hitting the rough idea of what that’s being talked about.
[00:18:04] Jackson: There’s nodes, ways, and areas. Nodes are points ways are lines. So nodes would be like a business or a point on a map that’s a business; a way would be like a a bike lane a road that kind of line thing; and then buildings would be represented as areas.
[00:18:19] Parker: And each of those things can have attributes to them um defining like if it is a uh an area that’s a building what is what kind of building is that what’s the purpose of the building and then you define that which then can further define for further things like if that building is a business what’s the business what kind of business uh what are their hours do they have air conditioning are they wheelchair accessible.
[00:18:44] Jackson: That’s all done through tagging if we use the term there that that’s tagging.
[00:18:49] Ian: So that data does exist okay because the one thing that has like kept me in Google Maps currently is like I cannot search for businesses in uh the Transit App for example right you know?
[00:19:04] Parker: Yeah, you can.
[00:19:05] Jackson: They’re often there.
[00:19:07] Ian: But I can’t look at that and be like “okay are they open right now?” you know like there’s a whole lot of information…
[00:19:13] Parker: Transit’s only viewing them as a destination not “is it open?”
[00:19:17] Jackson: Organic Maps or OsmAnd show that information to the extent that it exists and has been contributed by OpenStreetMap contributors which means that in an area that hasn’t had an active contributor around it the information could be pretty out of date.
[00:19:34] Ian: Does everything have to have a human contributor behind it because I suspect that like Google Maps is probably doing a lot of scraping of the open web to find out like oh yeah here’s this business we found their website they’ve listed their opening hours and yada yada so we’re just gonna add that to Google Maps.
[00:19:50] Jackson: So nothing like that happens with open street map that that would be a whole legal minefield I think but there are occasionally automated mass imports done when say there’s a government data set that is obtained and they get explicit consent that yes it can be used with OpenStreetMap all the licenses agree and then it’s still a very touchy process they have to do very carefully but then you can do a mass import of say properties you know property maps or or something like that and that’s how a lot of OpenStreetMap’s base layers kind of got established was there’s a big import I don’t know 2007 2008 of TIGER roads which laid out that the main roads of the whole of the US.
[00:20:37] Parker: TIGER for everybody else, TIGER is the Topographically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing which was done by the Census Bureau of all the roads.
[00:20:49] Ian: Sure that’s a way cooler name than I was expecting the Census Bureau to come up with. Yeah okay so I know how to get data out of the system I know how to contribute data back into the system; what do you what are like the most valuable things for people to be adding in there?
[00:21:11] Parker: I think really whatever you’re comfortable with doing.
[00:21:13] Jackson: That’s that’s the beautiful thing is that as long as it’s a real thing in the world it can go into OpenStreetMap and so you have people that are interested in all kinds of different things they each care about their kinds of things so some people are really focused on putting speed limits on roads into OpenStreetMap. I don’t drive much I don’t really care about that but if there’s you know something wrong with a bike lane connection to something else I’ll really care about that then there are people who just like making things pretty some people really like mapping trees so it’s really whatever whatever suits your fancy. As long as it’s a real thing in the world and it can be verified by someone else it can go there.
[00:21:51] Parker: My jumping off point for really contributing to it was the the town of like 500 or 400 or whatever I’m from in South Dakota had nothing on there an OpenStreetMap and I thought okay let’s see how, see if I can make this rather obscure map database thing more detailed than Google Maps so the couple of years I was still living back there.
[00:22:12] Ian: One man versus Google.
[00:22:16] Parker: If you look at my contributions on OpenStreetMap there’s a bunch of stuff around the Minneapolis area and whatnot but then in South Dakota there’s just one dot that’s really intense with a lot of contributions because it’s just an entire town is just all mine.
[00:22:33] Ian: Which does kind of speak to I would think one of the the weaknesses of this project is like similar to how Wikipedia you know like one of the criticisms of Wikipedia is that like you know it’s the the data set heavily skews towards like what are white males interested in right? And and how yeah how how is that worldview like particularly interested in things in the world and like yeah so yeah what’s like… I guess this kind of segues into like what’s the review process like you know how like do there have to be multiple users verifying something before it can appear you know like how does how do they deal with you know conflicting pieces of information?
[00:23:25] Jackson: Yeah there’s a lot there. On your point about Wikipedia, I did want to say OpenStreetMap definitely has that where you know Europe is really well represented on OpenStreetMap. Most of it because I think it’s used a lot more over there and anywhere where there’s a dense concentration of people cities are always pretty much always going to be better mapped than rural communities. But there are some communities within OpenStreetMap that kind of deliberately counteract that and they focus on what they call humanitarian mapping where say there’s been a natural disaster in Haiti or somewhere somewhere like that where it would be useful for first responders to know where the villages are where the buildings in those villages are. Google Maps doesn’t have that data, nobody has that data so then they’ll initiate a project in OpenStreetMap and there are people that are focused on this kind of flavor of mapping and they’ll go in look at aerial imagery and map the villages in OpenStreetMap so they can be used.
[00:24:24] Ian: So this is something that people are doing from home?
[00:24:26] Jackson: Yeah absolutely yeah. And so it kind of it has both both undercurrents through it and I think that’s really cool.
[00:24:38] Ian: Okay so then review process.
[00:24:40] Jackson: Yeah, so there is no explicit formal like somebody must check a box before your change goes in. You know you make an account you make your change it’s there in the map someone might come and look at that and decide that it might not be a good change you know there is sometimes kind of vandalism that happens and so people do come and review and there are ways to undo changes to open street map um but there’s no explicit like gatekeepers or anything like that is just-
[00:25:14] Ian: Is there like a change log for every exact feature?
[00:25:17] Jackson: Everything in it it’s got a full change log.
[00:25:19] Ian: And so is there anything analogous to like the talk page on Wikipedia?
[00:25:25] Jackson: Yep every single change set so it you know when you make a change to open street map it’s in a change set that has an id it also has a discussion right under it where anyone can leave a comment and say “hey i saw you made this change but that you know I’ve been there and that doesn’t seem quite right” and you can have a discussion there and straighten things out.
[00:25:43] Parker: I’ve had that a number of stuff for me of I’ve walked I walk by a place and I go “oh they closed down” so I make an edit. Well then somebody else walks by sees the change and then comments on my change and tells me “that’s not what I saw when I went by you know this number of days later.”
[00:26:00] Jackson: There are some groups within the open street map community that are particularly focused on countering vandalism and and that kind of stuff. Just to give an example I mentioned Pokemon Go earlier; that creates an interesting feedback loop where someone’s really interested in the game-
[00:26:21] Ian: Ah, incentive structures yeah yeah okay.
[00:26:24] Jackson: They know, beaches in open street map means it spawns these certain types of pokemon so let’s put a beach by my house that’s not really there. Thankfully it’s pretty easy you know the community got good at recognizing that type of contribution and and counteracting it but things like that happen.
[00:26:43] Parker: So there was another vested interest group in keeping Lake Chipotle.
[00:26:48] Ian: [laughter] Yeah our premier vacation spot.
[00:26:54] Parker: I think the thing we should note on too is that you can use the data set as um just a consumer having a map for biking or driving or you know whatever sort of like consumer thing you want to use. Also the data set is freely available to use for any development business or other purposes you want to use it for the the the license for using it is very open and allows you to have access to that data so like like we’ve seen uh Bikemap uses it for their product, Transit App uses it for their app.
[00:27:32] Jackson: Strava, Ride with GPS, Apple Maps indirectly through TomTom uses open street map data.
[00:27:37] Parker: and so if anybody wanted to if you if you wanted to make use of it that another way to do it is to make use to use it as a backend for your database. One that I learned recently is the ArcGIS or the the GIS uh data set stuff that’s used for like a lot of city and county project stuff um open street map has a version of that that is similar…
[00:27:59] Jackson: a person made a thing that uses open street map data for a similar purpose. I want to be clear about the distinction between the OpenStreetMap Foundation and the things that they build and maintain; and the wonderful huge ecosystem of random things that people build that use that data.
[00:28:20] Parker: okay that’s fair.
[00:28:21] Ian: So it’s a it’s a Creative Commons license right? I think we were talking before we started the recording that it’s a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike? And so I so that must mean that like any app that I’m using that does import the the open street maps data set they must have that like in their About page somewhere because they have to give attribution.
[00:28:45] Jackson: right exactly yeah or they really should yeah you know. But i think for example if you go digging in somewhere on on your iPhone and looking at Apple Maps information you’ll see a mention of of open street map yeah somewhere in there.
[00:28:59] Ian: now the the name “open street map” does imply a particular like priority for the for the data set right? You know like every map that you create is like it’s trying to communicate a particular thing about the world right? And so like you know an atlas right a road atlas is going to be very different than a topographical map right? And so just the name open street map to me tells me that like okay like streets, navigation, that like that is kind of the priority here um are is there any restriction on what kinds of things I can put in there?
[00:29:34] Parker: No.
[00:29:35] Ian: so like like I could draw topographical lines.
[00:29:37] Parker: Yeah. Yes? While Jackson thinks on that the name I think more so reflects on how it got started. OpenStreetMap out got started out of a want to have an open more open database of streets in London I believe or the UK. And I think it has since expanded out from there so I think it might there’s definitely like geographical information on there like landmarks.
[00:30:06] Jackson: I was nitpicking about the topographical lines I’m not I think there might be a way, it all comes down to whether people have come up with a scheme like a certain way to tag the lines and points that accurately represents the data. I think people maybe have i know for certain that say cliffs or can be mapped in there I’ve done that when you know out hiking and I see it a cliff it’s nice to kind of have that rendered on the map and so you can put pretty much anything in there as long as it is a real world verifiable thing. And and not temporary that’s another thing where if it’s too temporary then it doesn’t really belong on a map quite like this
[00:30:44] Ian: so yeah because I mean maps like Google Maps or or the Transit App like when I am doing bicycle directions they do tell me like oh what’s your elevation gain going to be across this trip I don’t know if that’s coming straight from open street map or if that is a different data set that they’re pulling from.
[00:31:04] Jackson: I think they’re usually mixing with a different data set, probably the USGS topographical, I think they have a pretty good… I’m not certain about that though.
[00:31:12] Parker: Yeah I’ll put in the show notes when I find out.
[00:31:15] Ian: which does make me that point actually does make me think about like okay, the value of like government-backed you know public sets of data right and what things are appropriate you know for like to be a government led project versus you know what things should we be relying on a cool community-driven you know nonprofit organization but it’s still you know like… and i feel like in Minnesota we we yeah we suffer from this a lot of like we have a really strong nonprofit organization ecosystem here in the Twin Cities but does that tell you something about like the gaps in what the government is actually providing for us like um so yeah like like it’s like having all of this data about the natural world right you know we have the topographical information from the government we’ve got a lot of like weather data you know coming from them but then it’s like okay why like why isn’t there um you know… TIGER is the example of like the street map data that’s available from them but of course it’s very slow moving.
[00:32:35] Jackson: And I think I’ve been surprised so there are a number of intersections of government and open street map. I think for example in France I think they have a current effort (this could be totally wrong we need to verify this) um i think they have an effort to get their power lines and power utility and transmission lines and every and all that in the open street map like as an official like that’s the government data source or something close to that. But it’s also I’ve seen times where you assume the government you know that they know where every single street is and and where the the gaps are and I think they often don’t necessarily until people come and complain to them about it so sometimes they do have these data sets that it’s it’s great for them to share and let other people use sometimes I think they don’t even know where things are.
[00:33:28] Ian: I had a surreal experience a few years ago when I was one of the co-chairs of the Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition and a an employee at Saint Paul Public Works approached us and was like “hey we want to have a thorough database of where all of the city-owned bike racks are.” And I was like, “what are you talking about? How do you not know that? You put them there! You own them how do you not know where they are?”
[00:34:01] Parker: Open infrastructure map which is built on the back of open street map data and is infrastructure stuff like power lines and stuff another thing that’s built on top of it is OpenRailwayMap which is all the rail lines in the United States and world which includes like is it electrified how fast can trains go on there what kind of what kind of things is it rated for who owns the line it’s really cool.
[00:34:26] Jackson: I sent you a thing a little bit ago of some guy… it was a project where where someone used they they launched a community effort to map information about street widths I believe? So Belgium is the country I was thinking of. Where they have a concept of a cycle street where cars aren’t allowed to overtake bicycles; and part of their laws is there must be if there is provably not enough I think less than a meter it says or something not enough space for a car to do that based on the width of the street, then it can kind of automatically be converted to a cycle street. And and so they launched a kind of advocacy campaign where they went into open street map and put in the data for the width of streets they went around measuring their streets and then they were able to bring that to their local government and say look all these streets are such and such widths and should therefore become cycle streets okay as they were able to kind of use that crowdsourcing power to get it into the map and then use that in their presentations to government of advocating why they should be converted to cycle streets.
[00:35:34] Ian: And that’s the kind of thing that like that organization could have just made a Google spreadsheet and been like hey everybody go in here and like note which streets you’ve measured and which ones fit this like width but open street map is right there.
[00:35:47] Jackson: It’s right there and now that they’re there for everyone
[00:35:50] Parker: right exactly and you also are able to do that very effectively because there’s no moderation except for the moderation; in that you’re not having Google there or whoever owns the map necessarily moderating every change you’re having the community there who is making sure that they are putting the correct stuff. If you’re in the area and you see something that’s wrong you’re more or less encouraged by your investment in contributing to it to make sure that information is correct.
[00:36:19] Ian: Bringing up like infrastructure like rail lines made me think of you know we kind of we’ve been kind of dancing around the subject of transit, right, like we’ve been talking about biking navigation right and like you know driving navigation are kind of easy applications of this data set but of course like for the transit app they have to layer on you know the APIs that they’re getting directly from, data that they’re getting directly from different transit agencies on top of open street map but you also talked about like oh you know information about particular bus stops you can put those in so like how detailed is that data is it going to be just attributes of the physical bus stop or can I also put in like “here’s the schedule of when the buses are supposed to arrive at this particular stop”?
[00:37:13] Jackson: the schedule I’m not so sure but the the routes buses take I know people sometimes make an effort to to put in where you can say it’s it’s this stop and then this stop and then this stop. Of course the challenges those tend to change fairly frequently.
[00:37:26] Ian: Quarterly!
[00:37:29] Jackson: And it takes someone quite dedicated to keep that all up to date. And so that’s in my experience hasn’t been very up-to-date information in open street map but the the bus stops and stations and all that are often mapped in excruciating detail specifying is there a trash can at this bus stop is there a timetable at the bus stop is it real time or is it a paper map. If someone had a thought of “oh I wish I knew if this bus stop had this thing” someone’s probably found a way to tag it on open street map.
[00:37:59] Parker: yeah the the schedule thing falls a little bit out of scope because it’s not a stationary thing it’s a it’s a moving thing. But then at the same time pretty much every transit agency has what is called a GTFS feed. GTFS is just the data spec that provides information about transit stuff whether like what the route is what its schedule is where the buses are stuff like that.
[00:38:24] Ian: oh so even transit agencies that don’t have a GPS unit on each of their buses like they would probably have a a static GTFO [laughter] about like what the usual schedule is.
[00:38:44] Parker: right okay um and it’s given that that the GTFS spec is an open standard and that open street map is an open database there are projects that do just that and combine them. Transit App’s a popular one that also does a lot of enriching with data. Another one that’s very fun is project MOTIS that does just that. Is that you um it runs a server that has open street map as the map data and then on top of that layers on the GTFS data for all the different routes and you can plug in as many GTFS routes into that as you want and it will all layer over on top of that.
[00:39:31] Ian: Okay, nice. Speaking of like standardized pieces of data sets of data how careful would I need to be when I’m contributing to open street map with like how I’m formatting the information that I’m putting in there?
[00:39:43] Jackson: it can be a little intimidating I’ll be honest. And that’s where I think apps like StreetComplete do a great job they really-
[00:39:53] Parker: It’s really pared down what you can edit.
[00:39:56] Jackson: they limit what you put in in such a way that you really can’t screw it up.
[00:40:02] Parker: pretty much the worst you can do is be wrong but you can’t be so wrong that something’s terrible.
[00:40:08] Jackson: so I’ll give an example one one fairly common tag for roads and parking lots and all kinds of stuff is “surface.” “Surface equals” like what is the surface of is it asphalt is it concrete that kind of thing. Under the hood all these things are just you know a text key equals a text value and so you could put whatever on the right and it’s if you put some nonsense in there then it’s likely that apps won’t have any idea what to do with that. But StreetComplete when you want to set-
[00:40:36] Ian: they give you a drop down menu.
[00:40:38] Jackson: yeah they give you an array of images even of what the various surfaces are and then you just tap and yeah okay it looks like that you’re good to go. So you it’s it you can kind of go as deep as you want you can go really deep um into some tagging schemes get really complex and the the source of truth for all of that is the open street map wiki which is kind of the the definition of how all these things are tagged into the database if it tickles your fancy you can go really deep into that. I know I like that but I think a lot of people enjoyed street complete as it is.
[00:41:13] Parker: It’s kind of a benefit of open street map is that there is a number of tools and utilities to engage with that at different levels and you can go as simple or as in depth as you want and there will be there’s probably something out there that can meet the needs or the expectation that you’re having for it.
[00:41:31] Jackson: but another client that I should mention is MapComplete that’s it’s kind of a web-based thing so it works on both iOS and Android and it its approach is to kind of have different focused maps so there’s a trees map there’s I think cyclo fix is one of its layers where it shows bike lanes and places to fix your bike and i think drinking fountains there’s like a public restrooms ones they each have this kind of really specific focus there’s a public book cases one for free little little free library is that kind of thing and it does a similar thing where because it has that focus it has an editor flow that’s really well tailored to that exact perspective on open street map data so that’s another very accessible one.
[00:42:21] Ian: yeah information that is like super useful to know when you’re like out on a bike ride drinking fountains exactly fix it stations also like bathrooms yeah; and that one is is particularly challenging here in Minnesota where it’s like okay Minneapolis Park Board has bathrooms at a lot of parks but not October through April. Like yeah how do you how do you even tag that kind of thin?
[00:42:47] Jackson: the tag is called “seasonal.” So you can get pretty specific with that. There’s also um you can use the same tag that’s used for businesses to say when they’re open; it’s a very general schema for that where you can say certain months of the of the year when something’s open.
[00:43:02] Ian: do a bunch of Spirit Halloween’s pop up in open street map?
[00:43:05] Parker: you know oh my god that would be so interesting to pull data on that.
[00:43:09] Jackson: I need to check that that’d be great.
[00:43:14] Parker: That’d be a fun project.
[00:43:16] Jackson: how often do they come back to the same location? Because otherwise it might be a little too temporary to… really yeah yeah sure that’d be interesting. You know i can act all heroic of like I love contributing to the world but there is a part of contributing to open street map that for me that just kind of tickles my brain of like trans- I look at the real world and encoding that into this you know series of key value pairs and and lines and points that I just find kind of satisfying. And I know that’s often the case with some people some people are purely the term is “armchair mappers” where they they stay at home and they look at um aerial imagery of completely other places in the world, mapping sidewalks or something and there’s something kind of meditative about it sometimes.
[00:44:06] Ian: it’s a productive version of playing GeoGuessr.
[00:44:08] Jackson: yeah, like you you’re doing something good for the world but you’re also just there drawing some lines and and saying this is a sidewalk and it connects over here.
[00:44:19] Parker: yeah and I think it has a whole lot more purpose especially nowadays with a lot of online services that we’ve kind of taken for granted for a while getting enshittified and the what was just given to be like a yeah you know the service is fine you can just kind of use it to being well now it’s rate limited now you have to pay more for it now now you have to give up a lot more of your privacy or just a lot more carve-outs have to be made to be okay using a thing. I think there is a lot of value out of a service that says here’s the data you are welcome to contribute to it if that is of interest to you.
[00:44:57] Jackson: yeah and you mentioned like Google Maps for example they’re they’re doing more and more advertising within the map where you search restaurants and the restaurants that paid Google get their their little pins made a little bit larger they’re listed higher in the listing and so I think it’s a really it’s a nice act of defiance to me to to put the information into open street map where there’s there’s none of that it’s it’s by the people for the people it can be used however people want if there isn’t information that’s right you can go and fix it there’s no corporate overlords here and in the way.
[00:45:29] Parker: and in the same kind of act of defiance way i have this itch in my brain that says I want the community one to be more accurate more up to date and higher quality than whatever else can be done. Google or whoever else might have millions upon billions of dollars but I live here and I can update this before you even have the chance to pay somebody out here to survey it.
[00:45:52] Jackson: for example a coffee shop just opened right near me and I had it in there the day it opened and I don’t think it was in Google yet and that gave me a little bit of satisfaction to know for that one was a couple days open street map was ahead of Google.
[00:46:06] Parker: I do try to whenever I do stuff like that like find the contact for the business and tell them “hey I’m excited you’re opening, I added you to open street map you might want to make sure that the information that is accurate” as just a small way to you know if it’s a business I’m excited about having their kind of engage with them but then also let them know of oh there’s more than just Google Maps.
[00:46:28] Jackson: And Ian you mentioned that Google’s… I think they are doing some you know at the heart of Google is a web scraper that goes and crawls every website that’s out there. I think they do some of that but I think also when you’re opening a business people know you’ve got to get on Google Maps if you want to get people in there right and so they go in and make sure that they’re on Google Maps. And nobody really has that thought – I mean not nobody, I have seen some do it for open street map but it’s not nearly as present in people’s minds
[00:46:56] Parker: and given the you know the back end database type nature of it it’s not thought of well I need to make sure it’s updated on there which then kind of becomes the flaw of well a ton of other things do use it as their back end so having that data there is useful.
[00:47:12] Ian: right and on the subject of enshittification like there was… like Google’s heyday I feel like was like late 2000s early 2010s right and they had a lot of projects that were like more community facing and more like like I remember a time when there was an interface for you to go and contribute information to Google Maps and like there was some review process but I did feel like I was directly actually adding information to Google Maps.
[00:47:45] Jackson: you’re making me now remember that. I actually did that for one of my local parks growing up where there was a kind of loop trail going around the park that Google didn’t know about. I went and I drew those lines around it. Yeah I don’t know if it ever made it onto the map because there is that review process.
[00:47:59] Ian: right right but like that kind of goodwill that you build up in the community but then because that dataset was never actually fully open and like you know like it they had the ability to close it down whenever they like get rid of that contribution system whenever they wanted to and they did and like right it didn’t fundamentally change most people’s relationship with Google Maps and so there wasn’t this sudden outcry right?
[00:48:31] Parker: right because the information that you’re contributing wasn’t for you or for the community was for Google.
[00:48:36] Jackson: right for them to make more money.
[00:48:39] Ian: And like and so I do feel a little bit that way with things like the Transit App where it’s like yeah they’re asking me all these questions and it’s you know it is information that’s being shared with the transit agencies and supposedly it’ll help other riders as well but I’m also like like I know that I am interacting with a private business, I’m much more cognizant of that now than I was you know when a lot of these cloud-based services were becoming popular and I was young and impressionable high schooler.
[00:49:11] Jackson: and open street map exists outside of all that is run by a non-profit foundation that its purpose is to make it’s to keep this map running and then it’s it’s up to the people to contribute the information to it
[00:49:25] Ian: yep and and even if like that particular foundation goes south like the data set is licensed to be open so anybody can replicate it.
[00:49:38] Jackson: and it has been replicated constantly everywhere.
[00:49:41] Parker: Believe it or not this large community driven project has had points of contention and people have decided to take that data set and do what they want with it and it’s been fine it it in some ways helps keep the system healthy by ensuring that people can have the say they need to and continue working on it in different ways.
[00:49:58] Jackson: one angle we haven’t talked about with being able to just download the data set is it’s also used in research a fair bit because it’s data that’s there it’s ready it’s often pretty accurate and really you can just go download the data. Parker did the other night he went and downloaded data for a good chunk of Minnesot.
[00:50:15] Parker: the project MOTIS thing that I was talking about I set up my own web server for that to just play around with.
[00:50:21] Ian: How big of a zip file are we talking?
[00:50:25] Parker: so the one for Minnesota was a good couple gigabytes. That was the closest down I could get it. There’s different services that provide different chunks of like different sections of the map so you can get one for the midwest or just Minnesota or for the whole United States and they’re also different services based on different uh parameters have different schemas for how often they update it some might charge for more frequent ones all that sort of stuff. The one for open street map, sorry the one for the the world, the whole planet… what do they call it what’s the file name for it?
[00:50:58] Jackson: planet.osm yeah yeah the the planet file depending on the compression scheme used if it’s uncompressed it’s about 2000 gigabytes. Compressed with bzip2 it would be 155 gigs, there’s another that can do 83 gigs. There was recent news about one that got it even smaller and that’s for the whole world.
[00:51:16] Ian: wow nice.
[00:51:18] Jackson: but that accessibility means that if you’re a researcher who wants to look at you know some correlation between I don’t know bike bike lanes and poverty or vice versa I don’t know whatever. The information’s there you can write some scripts that parse out the the particular tags and information that you care about and then you can do your research on it.
[00:51:44] Parker: it makes it very easy to overlay the data other data on top of it that you want to make your research or comparison or tool out of um like we talked about before with bike map overlays uh geographical data to have elevation um open infrastructure map overlays on top different infrastructure information or mixed use of the infrastructure information inside open street map um there’s tons of things you can do with it because at the end it’s just a map with values on it.
[00:52:10] Jackson: it’s also a fun lens into where things are changing. Like here Hennepin Ave just finished construction, opened up and I’ve kind of watched in open street map as… I didn’t personally go in and make many changes there but I watched as people marked the different sections as under construction and I saw that the very first thing to be put in was a bike lane because there’s a local person who’s really on top of all that. And then kind of watching how its form has changed and you can kind of go back in time um and look at older open street map data sets and you can kind of compare how has this changed from a couple years ago.
[00:52:50] Parker: how far back do they keep archives of older versions?
[00:52:54] Jackson: I’m not certain off the top of my head but I think in theory forever because there’s just the change log. There’s the change log where every object has its history since it was created once it’s deleted then it’s kind of harder to find but I’m sure that’s still there. I’m not sure.
[00:53:11] Parker: that’d be interesting
[00:53:14] Ian: are there any um organizations that are like does archive.org keep track of you know like okay can I go back and look at what an open street map like dataset would have would have looked like you know 10 years ago?
[00:53:33] Jackson: I’m not sure. A related project is OpenHistoricalMap. It’s basically open street map but doing it for the whole of human history. Where there are people that you know are really focused on mapping the extent of the Roman Empire or whatever, or the extent of the the British Empire. It is a separate database just because those are very different needs.
[00:53:54] Ian: yeah though I mean the the amount of complexity there isn’t that much more like you’re just adding one new piece of data and that is time
[00:54:04] Jackson: pretty much like I think they’re very similar in a lot of ways in their tagging schemes. One thing we haven’t talked about at all is accessibility um it’s there’re communities that are really dedicated to marking what is wheelchair accessible where are curb cuts on sidewalks that kind of thing and then building custom routing engines that can help that kind of navigation. I think that can it can really vary in its detail as with anything on open street map but again it just shows that without Google in the way deciding what decide what belongs in the map and what doesn’t, then people can decide for themselves and whatever is useful to someone there’ll be something in there.
[00:54:49] Parker: And I think that kind of plays into the benefit of open street map is it is made for you for you to use how you want to not for the purpose of getting you to use Google’s suite of different services or Apple suite of services.
[00:55:07] Jackson: or feed you to advertising information or anything.
[00:55:11] Parker: right it’s it’s just a database have at it.
[00:55:13] Ian: so if somebody wanted to get started like dip their toes into the water of editing would it would it be reasonable to be like okay pick up one of these clients for for editing walk around your block and like pick a thing that you want like that you want to make your specialty?
[00:55:30] Jackson: yeah if you’re on Android and can use StreetComplete that that’s a perfect way to go about it.
[00:55:38] Parker: it really just get get that app and go for a walk and look around your neighborhood they’re all they’re as as dedicated as people are there will be something that’s out of date or something that could be-
[00:55:47] Jackson: you can always add more detail.
[00:55:51] Parker: yep there’s always more to add and every every detail you add is is always valuable to improve that database and help make a closer connection you have with your community in a way that you might not have seen before.
[00:56:03] Ian: that is a wonderful sentiment for us to end on, I’d say.
[00:56:08] Parker: well Jackson thank you for joining us.
[00:56:10] Jackson: yeah thank you for having me.
[00:56:11] Parker: on the OpenStreets.mn Podcast.
[00:56:15] Ian: and Parker thanks for having the idea for this wonderful episode.
[00:56:18] Parker: no problem.
[00:56:20] Ian: And thank you for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast!
The show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative license. So feel free to republish the episode as long as you are not altering it, and you are not profiting from it.
The music in this episode is by Erik Brandt and the Urban Hillbilly Quartet.
This episode was produced by Parker Seaman, and was hosted, edited, and transcribed by me, Ian R Buck.
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