My one wish was the OSM had a great app for discovering POI or reviews. Like something that can show me all the bookstores around but with a little extra human touch on if it's nice to sit at or mostly used books or something like this.
Note: it takes a little while to load all of Amsterdam.
Disclaimer: I'm the (main) dev of mapcomplete
Routing me through a park in the middle of the night, when it was closed, was one. Taking me on a detour to avoid a busy road, which turned to be on a farm track where the road surface was completely destroyed, was another.
I can't even describe the level of frustration this causes because I'm forced to use a non-existant street name for packages because otherwise no courier finds me.
The edit review system for Maps is really frustrating. Sometimes obscure things are approved instantly, and sometimes really important things are silently ignored.
I once attached a news article to my report, and they still denied it. I've also added street vendors like "coconut cakes lady" and had them approved.
This is a throwaway obviously since this basically 50% doxes me.
Would you be willing to elaborate a bit more on those privacy considerations?
(I guess what I'm struggling with is how cycling is different in this regard from other modalities.)
Edit: By the way, the massive difference in potential users compared to all other modes is also why it’s so hard to prioritise work on cycling inside Google.
In large part because cycling is fairly resistant to traffic jams
Whereas car drivers often use navigation all the time to see traffic and alternatives, which are non-issues for cyclists.
Thus even with many cyclists the information they collect is less.
There’s a labyrinth of explicit user agreements, all of which are strictly enforced, and then there are further layers of voluntary restrictions on top of that.
Yes, Google might collect location data even when you’re not using Maps (there are a lot of passionate, dedicated Timeline users), but you have to have that enabled, and even then the data can only be used in certain ways.
Maybe they fail to use it competently but it definitely collects a lot of data and attempting to stop it results in punitive reactions and disabling of features not needing it - and repeated badgering to permit Google to collect data again.
Google also collects data that I was initially unaware that it is collecting.
Of course that opt-in requirement was only the result of a hard-fought class action settlement.
Take this with a grain of salt as my recollection of the litigation is somewhat hazy. But I believe Google argued, even when a user opted out of location tracking, Google could still keep the data for its own uses. Ie opting out of location tracking simply meant the user didn't have access to their location history, it didn't show up on the phone (couldn't be searched by suspicious spouses) etc.
In a car you can charge your phone and battery usage for GPS isn't as much of a problem.
The Cowboy bike company have started using Google Maps for navigation in their app, which is a bummer: Before the change, the navigation would reliably take direct me to use roads that a bike friendly. Now it does just the opposite: it wants me to take big roads that are only friendly to cars.
Add that there’s no Android or Google Auto for bikes, you usually don’t charge while biking, etc. The people who do need to look up their cycling route typically do it beforehand, so in the end even in cycling-heavy regions there are very few using active navigation.
Delivery workers will in regions where that’s common, but they likely use company-provided or other local solutions.
hit is not how I use navigation apps when cycling. When I don't know the way, I start my navigation app (not gmaps) when I drive off, because
- I don't want to stop midway to check where I need to go, when I can do that when I get on the bike - I don't know where exactly to stop to check where to go - If I don't know where exactly I want to go, going roughly in the right direction probably means that I cycle longer than I need to
But at least it leaves room for other companies in some situations. What’s really sad is when there’s something that could only be done by Apple or Google, but it’s too small for either of them to actually do it.
As it is, offline routers such as Brouter and OSMAnd do a much better job, and it's pretty easy to convince other cyclists to use them.
Traffic jams are almost never an issue when biking - heavy car or bike traffic can slow you down, but by that point you have at least the same density as car traffic jams for data collection...
Lastly, is there anything stopping you from contributing potential innovations to open source alternatives?
OSM is much, much better but I guess Google refuses to pull OSM data because it would require them to open up their own maps.
For pedestrian, I’d disagree. At least in places I go, I find Google’s walking directions to be top notch.
The main thing I use Google Maps for is searching for stores etc in cities. I hope such information becomes easier to contribute to OSM.
Perhaps a Pokémon Go style game for map updates could work? StreetComplete[0] is good, but the rewards are kind of boring.
In large cities, the roads are the only routes, so pedestrians can go OK with GMaps. Anywhere else & Google is prone to send you waltzing down a main road instead of the paths marked for actual pedestrian use in my experience. Same for cycling.
Thanks for trying, at least: You weren’t able to shift leviathan, but there’s no shame in that.
(Unaffiliated happy user.)
I like that it allows you to choose between paved, gravel or any. Although gravel may still be too limited for some; mountainbikers like dirt tracks, and I've had Google Maps send me through loose sand that would probably require a BMX.
Oh, good spot. Fixed. OSM geocoding is better than it used to be - I used to just say "town" because streetnames were partial, but they're pretty good now.
If you have a start and endpoint that should use Sarphatistraat but don't, I'm all ears. (It's my site!)
Try "Feike de Boerlaan" to "Vondelpark". I would expect the trip to take the Czaar Peterstraat and then the Sarphatistraat, but instead it takes the Panamalaan, Zeeburgerdijk, Mauritskade, and only switches to the Sarphatistraat at the Weesperplein, which I think is also the point where the Sarphatistraat changes from a bike street to a regular street with a bike lane. Although it later switches back to bike street again yet the route stays on the bike street.
So I have no idea what's going on with that first part of the Sarphatistraat. It's a really nice route, yet all apps hate it.
cycle.travel's scoring for the two routes differs by 0.4% so it's very close. In OSM data terms, the challenge is that there's no particular special tagging for the Sarphatistraat - it just gets classed as a "cycleway", same as the route along Mauritskade. Plus there's a couple of very slight advantages for the Panamalaan (which is tagged as part of a designated longer-distance bike route) and the Zeeburgerdijk/Mauritskade (which are beside water so get a scenic uplift).
I might look at doing some Amsterdam-specific routing tweaks: I doubt the longer-distance bike route consideration should be relevant in this case, for example.
> I doubt the longer-distance bike route consideration should be relevant in this case
Or maybe it is, but then it's relevant for all routes involved, including the Sarphatistraat (which is short distance for cars, but long distance for bikes).
From my early tests, Organic Maps also sends you down dangerous routes, so I'll use cautiously.
If you bookmark streets that it's sending you down or avoiding inaccurately and check them out later on a computer, I bet you'll find that there's some OSM tagging issue. https://osm.org has a routing tool you can compare with as well. The OM Telegram channel is always willing to take reports on where OM routes are worse than OSM.org routes, and OSM channels are happy to help figure out what tagging issues there may be.
Cheers!
I wish there were a true flattest route app/website that prioritized quieter roads and more gentle slopes by default using existing terrain data instead of making users manually add a bunch of waypoints using their own knowledge in order to compare elevation profiles.
If you just want to try the routing, there's brouter-web too ;)
Although now that I think about it, Google Maps lets me down on vacation because I'm in unfamiliar territory and I have no idea how to correct for the mistakes it makes. When I'm at home (in Amsterdam) it makes plenty of mistakes too, but I'm familiar with them and the are, so I can easily correct for it.
For example, Google really dislikes the Sarphatistraat for some reason. It's a bike street: basically a gigantic bike path that also allows cars, but bikes have right of way. It's one of the most important bike thoroughfares in Amsterdam, so of course you should always take it. But for some reason, Google always prefers to send me along the Stadhouderskade, which is part of the centrumring for cars, one of the major car thoroughfares, parallel to the Sarphatistraat, and it does have a separate bike path, but you're still in car fumes. Also, it's slightly longer.
There are plenty of other bike routes it doesn't know. I should really try to get used to using Organic Maps on my bike from now on. It's excellent on bike and pedestrian infrastructure, including hiking trails, things to see, etc. Many years ago when I first learned about OSM, I was amazed about the level of detail I got when I zoomed in on Artis, the Amsterdam Zoo. You don't get that kind of detail on Google Maps. I really should use it more.