Yeah. Story time:

In the England we have ancient rights-of-way laws but a lot of private landowners try to block footpaths that cross their land. If a landowner can argue a footpath hasn’t been used in (I think) two years they can have it removed, but in 2025 all the existing footpaths will be made permanent and indelible except with explicit local government permission so between now and then a lot of landowners will be rushing to get paths removed.

I’ve made a point of walking every footpath in my area and making sure they’re all documented on OSM. If any of the landowners try to get a path removed I have my GPS tracks as proof of use.

Edit: FWIW, I find OSM to be the best map for rambling. Google and Apple don’t come close and OSM even gives Ordinance Survey a run for it’s money.

I’ve been editing OSM for years. (896,339 edits in 3,427 changesets, apparently!) For me, it’s all about the free data. I once got a thank you note from someone who worked for a city with a particularly large municipal park. I’d added almost all the trails to the park and other information, and they’d used it to produce a printed map for the general public. Exactly the kind of thing I’d hoped for!

Personally, I do a lot of dualsport motorcycling and most backcountry maps around here are subpar. I map tons of trails and 2track and put them on the Garmin so I know where I’m going.

OSM is also great in lots of Europe–tons of detail.

JOSM is great.

Someone just recommended Organic Maps for the phone–it’s way snappier than Google Maps, but still not great with finding addresses.

https://streetcomplete.app/ is a fun way to contribute to OSM and do something else instead of just “walking” if you want to get outside a bit.

I use it quite often, but only recently began contributing. And as they (very) wisely say at the bottom of the wiki (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editing_Standards_and_Conventions ):

WARNING: OpenStreetMap is highly addictive Take frequent breaks, there is a lot to be done.

I contribute regularly. I used to waste a lot of time watching TV series, instead now I contribute to OSM.

I’m in the UK and open street map has mapped out my local area more accurately than google. It is marginal, but I stopped using google maps after a few issues: I was hiking and it directed me into a privately owned farm (claiming it is a permissive footpath).The farmer was very racist.

Another time I was directed through the middle of a primary school.

BTW there’s now an OSM community !openstreetmap@lemmy.ml

you like lemmy? it works because ppl contribute. osm…same! try https://streetcomplete.app and contribute!!!

OSM is huge for backcountry. Hiking trails, skiing, etc. There is nothing better.

I have done 14k edits over six years. I too like it for being therapeutic. I’d rather do micro-edita on osm than play another level of candy crush. Same kind of reward but you are also helping out creating something larger!

Honestly though, I don’t think osm will ever catch up to the commercial alternatives. Mostly because their harsh stance against automatic edits (and lack of version control). Also the lack of standardization is a problem. It’s very hard to create client applications because the data is structured way different in different regions.

We use OSM quite a bit for various things at my job (transport logistics software). We’re generally concerned with UK cities, where the coverage is quite good, however we often find little things which aren’t quiiiite right and make a fix or two.

It’s a really cool project, overall

Yes, all the time. Great job helping out the project! Contributing is super valuable, even if it’s just a bit.

Check out if you haven’t, the app “Street Complete”. It allows you to really quickly add information to OSM in a fun gamified way.

It automatically finds your location and gives you little pop-up questions like, “what kind of crosswalk is here?” And, “where is this fire hydrant located?”

I go on walks in my area and will contribute that way too.

I use, and contribute to it, quite often.

In fact, just a few months ago I added the 90% missing houses and buildings from my city (of 200,000), which took about 60 hours 😂 Totally worth it.

Keep in mind that not only do OpenStreetMap users benefit from the maps, but so do users of countless other map providers and services that rely on OSM data. 👌

I got very into it in the early days. Probably around 2007-2008, I was mapping parts of my large town in Australia. The data it had was pretty bad, with a lot of the roundabouts modelled as intersections and it didn’t have any new streets. Every week I rode my bike around parts of town capturing GPS trails to mark the streets. I would manually import the points and model the roads and carefully model the roundabouts (the tooling was very basic back then, roundabouts were hard to make).

Then one day I logged in and noticed ALL my edits were gone. The whole state had been mass updated in one go, with new street data that was donated by some agency. But it was so bad. It has roads marked that didn’t exist. Some new roads were marked but in the wrong place. And all the roundabouts were modelled as intersections again! I got so frustrated, I immediately logged off and I haven’t contributed to OSM since then.

I regularly use OSM data through Organic Maps (mostly for larger European cities). The app is really polished and is a joy to use. So far I’m not missing any features from Google Maps.

I’ve also updated some faulty business hours for some restaurants so I guess I’ve contributed back.

E: With the recent developments in the world of free online services (YouTube blocking ad-blockers, Google lying to their customers about its TrueView ads, Twitter rate limiting free access, the Reddit API fiasco), I wonder how much longer we can take free services like Google Maps for granted. Having an open alternative may become even more important in the future.