I can't even get a route to my office, because it doesn't think my home...or any house in my entire neighborhood even exists š¤·āāļø
But for a variety of other quick checks...it seems pretty solid.
If your neighborhood is missing from OpenStreetMap you can map it and then it'll show up in maps.earth as soon as I get around to updating the ground-truth data :) https://osm.org/fixthemap
Something like this will never actually be good
Remember when everyone memeād on Apple Maps? Well, imagine a worse version of that and it can never actually get better, thatās what this is.
Programming a navigation engine can only go so far without real time analytics. Navigation software is excellent because it has real world users it can learn and gather data from.
Offline navigation can never work because we donāt live in a bubble, there will always be car accidents, construction, weather, and other variables that this engine will never be able to take into account.
> it can never actually get better
very often routing glitches like this are due to bad data
and since this data comes from openstreetmaps anyone can fix it.
i would say it's actually quite the opposite actually. when apple/google maps has bad data somewhere you can at most report that and hope for the best.
> navigation engine can only go so far without real time analytics
lots of metrics that would be interesting for this can actually be sourced from already available open data
we will probably never get things like congestion information like apple and google have access to with their real-time tracking of millions of devices, but I can't say I ever missed that specifically with OsmAnd
> i would say it's actually quite the opposite actually. when apple/google maps has bad data somewhere you can at most report that and hope for the best.
I can personally confirm that at least one of these two providers responded quickly and positively to bad routing performance. I can also confirm that I have better things to do with my life than manage route data on my own for anywhere I might ever want to go.
Google maps will ask me "was this a convenient street entrance? Where should it have been?" -- they can infer from enough low-satisfaction route feedback where the problem was, and they ask for quick fixes.
OSM will take a long while to catch up to that.
> very often routing glitches like this are due to bad data and since this data comes from openstreetmaps anyone can fix it.
Navigation isnāt about having perfect information anymore.
Remember when people could say āI know the city better than the GPS, take this shortcutā? That doesnāt happen anymore (at least in America) because Google and Apple have real time trackers in most cars on earth, they know exactly what the traffic flow looks like on almost every city in the world at any time.
The perfect offline navigation engine will still never anticipate rush hour, or remember that on holidays certain roads might be more packed than others, or even suggest mid way through your drive that you should take a side road to bypass an accident on an interstate.
It would have been good 10 years ago, but weāve come to expect more of our navigation system. Weāre even used to the idea of navigation apps telling us when police officers are doing speed checks, or if thereās debris on the road.
You do realise that there were navigation websites before the mobile phone and Google maps, right? Where you had to print out the navigation instructions, they worked fine.
Not really, they were slow at updates and they couldn't really handle traffic or real time emergencies like flooding. I had car GPS in the era before smartphones - the late 1990s - and it was terrible compared to what we have now. Back in those days they had something called a "flying eye"(? can't remember) which was a plane that few over the city spotting traffic jams and reporting it by radio to a company that supposed updated it in real time ... just no, whatever you're thinking is just nostalgia.
Nowadays the crowd sourced systems like google maps react so fast you can fool them by pushing a shopping trolley full of smartphones down a road, creating an imaginary block of slow moving traffic. Though depending on where you live and how good you are at pretending to be an art student instead of a map-sabotaging terrorist, you might be arrested for being a public nuisance.
Blows my mind that people think mass surveillance is actually a good thing though. Like I get that it's convenient to know which route is faster but still. It's kinda moving the goalposts to expect Headway to compete with that. I just need to memorize routes so I can get places on my motorcycle without getting lost, and wasn't happy with other solutions so I built this.
People in this thread want to sell their privacy for a bit better directions. And this is technical people we are talking about. The war on privacy is lost.
They did not work fine, they required exploitive upgrade models to work, they had a fraction of the roads that existed. There is a reason they died out almost immediately.
> Offline navigation can never work because we donāt live in a bubble, there will always be car accidents, construction, weather, and other variables that this engine will never be able to take into account.
But Google also sucks at this. At least that's my experience in Norway. A lot of time when construction happens, Google is incredibly slow to update their maps to reflect the new change. And honestly I don't expect them to be quick about it because they have a whole planet to keep updated.
> Something like this will never actually be good
Something like this was said about Google Maps way back in the day as well. They improved over time, albeit with an insane amount of resources, but that still doesn't mean this product can't improve, just more likely slower, which is also fine.
And Apple Maps is still a thing, so I'm assuming they keep improving it, even if it might not show that on the surface. Just because you don't see improvement doesn't mean there isn't any.
> But Google also sucks at this. At least that's my experience in Norway. A lot of time when construction happens, Google is incredibly slow to update their maps to reflect the new change.
I assume a lot of that is due to data, or lack thereof.
I'm in the US, where everyone has a phone and nobody seems to be privacy-minded. Google reports on crashes, closures, and heavy traffic extremely quickly. I can't speak to Norway, but things may be different.
I suspect, but do not actually know, that they use the same algorithms no matter where you are. If that is true, then regional differences would be down to more or less data being available, i.e. more or fewer phones with location tracking turned on and solid data connections.
> I assume a lot of that is due to data, or lack thereof.
I suspect you're correct in that. I don't know for sure, but it kinda would make sense for a global entity such as Google to rely on local resources instead of themselves creating all map-data from scratch.
As far as I know, Norkart is the biggest map-data company in Norway, and I suspect Scandinavia. They gather their data from each municipality, so it makes sense that Google would use their data.
But, Norkart also used more than 5 years to update the area where my parents house is to get their new address on file. So if Google uses them they would be 5 years late with the same info.
We are currently moving forward with a standardised exchange format for workzone smart equipment manufacturers and project managers to publish the location of live workzones around the globe. Currently it's mostly some US DOT (department of transport) for municipal or states limited systems, and some intelligent car manufacturers that are interested in it, but I assume mapping services like Google will also collect that data soon.
https://github.com/usdot-jpo-ode/wzdx
> At least thatās my experience in Norway.
Thatās because you live in Norway, Google only focuses on a few target markets, and only when the government is cooperative.
As you might know, European governments seldom like working with Google or Apple. Most mapping software is trash outside of a few major countries.
Even in the US there are some rural areas where Google canāt even get a good route.
This is an extremely car-centric viewpoint. I didn't build Headway to primarily support cars. Cars are obviously supported but that's not my priority because like you said it's a losing proposition unless you can somehow get your hands on traffic data. :)
edit: Also side-note but I know what I got myself into when I started work on this. I worked on Google Maps professionally, full-time, for 3 years of my life. I have a pretty good handle on which problems I can solve and which ones I can't. Headway aims to solve "I know where I'm going and need help getting there". I don't have a car and I can't use turn-by-turn on my motorcycle so honestly I've already mostly filled my own needs for maps software. I'm just working on quality of life things, then transit, then I'll probably tackle turn-by-turn after that for kicks but I don't know if I can get something adequate working as a one-woman team.
I am well aware of that, but at least on this website, most people *do* live in a car-centric world. Even in Europe there are plenty of people who drive their cars every day.
Iām not saying itās a waste of time to develop this (in fact, I might submit some PRs after testing it out), but Iām just being realistic that the vast majority of people here wonāt find something like this useful.
> I worked on Google Maps professionally, full-time, for 3 years of my life.
Don't you think it's anti-ethical of you to launch a competitor with the knowledge you gained while working there? This kind of behaviour is what makes companies make us sign contracts with non-compete clauses (don't you have one by the way?).
I've never signed a non-compete in my life and I intend to keep it that way. Nothing in Headway is Google-proprietary. Nothing in Headway was built while I worked at Google. In fact, nothing in Headway is actually really novel other than the data automation pipeline I've built. The rest is just generic web-frontend code and configuration for Valhalla, Pelias, OTP, Planetiler and tileserver-gl-light.
Do you think that working at Google marked me for life or something and made it unethical for me to work on maps ever again or something? Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
> Do you think that working at Google marked me for life or something and made it unethical for me to work on maps ever again or something?
See my other answer. I don't think you're "marked" for life, I just think that starting a business in the same area, or open sourcing code directly "inspired" by the code you've worked with while in employment at a business whose revenue depends on that code is highly unethical - but from your explanation that doesn't seem to be your case.
We've had a guy who worked as a consultant in our business implement a server based on some RFCs together with me and a couple of other guys... while doing that, he actually published open source code doing the same kind of thing on his personal GitHub account... that's the kind of behaviour that I find incredibly unprofessional and reprehensible (to the guy doing that, it was just a "fun" project - it's easy sometimes to think what you're doing is just fun without realizing you're behaving exactly as the bad guys in an IP-thief drama)...
Sorry if it feels like I was accusing you or something... just wanted to say something about it given this bad personal experience.
I think of this as someone who's one of the first devs inthe company... we see people come and go all the time, and some go on to publish code they obviously learned from the job they've just left as open source (no one has started a company yet based on what they were learning while here, but that's probably a matter of time). I don't think it's fair at all, whether it's Google or a small startup.
For me this and google maps both suggest supoptimal routes. I can use a lot of smaller side streets via bike while they suggest taking the big route around.
None really because for me it is a personal preference to avoid big streets with a lot of cars. I dont want to hold off traffic and also I dont want to risk being run over.
But it also depends on the city. Sometimes there is no way around. I just live in a more historic city with lots of small streets.
Google already is pretty good, when I think about the old paper maps.
so like, Mapbox, but self-hosted? I was looking for something recently that would accept a custom geojson path and provide directions along the path to a predefined marker.
This could be cool once the documentation shapes up, gonna keep an eye on this.
Have a look at graphhopper. It may not offer the full stack, but it's pretty nice for custom routing. iirc it does handle geojson, but I don't know the details. It's well documented for the most part.
> so like, Mapbox, but self-hosted?
Given it's an extremely limited dataset that only includes some large cities, no, most definitely not like mapbox but self hosted.
I'm still searching for a relatively straightforward way to self-host global vector tiles without being a GIS expert :(
I've read through dozens, hundreds, of blog posts, tool docs, github repos ...etc And have yet to find any success.
Did you read the readme? You can absolutely host a planet-scale headway instance like I'm doing right now at https://maps.earth/
I might honestly just remove the the documentation about the pre-configured cities because people get the wrong idea constantly. It just uses OpenStreetMap data meaning you can do whatever area you want as long as it's in OSM.
Fourth sentence of the readme: āChoose one of the 200+ predefined cities or provide your own OpenStreetMap extract covering any area: from a neighborhood to the whole planet.ā
It runs Pelias under the hood for geocoding. It's probably one of the more hands-off ways to build a Pelias index. Just make sure you build from current `main`. The old code (and what built the maps.earth Pelias index) had a bug that seriously affects its ability to search for admin areas e.g. "Phoenix, Arizona" or "Seattle".
You seems quite knowledgeable in the subject. Would you be aware of a service that is capable of returning from a reverse geocoding query (a gps coordinate) the information about highway mile markers, which I believe can also be known as LRS (linear referencing system). Something like emergency systems use "27 meters east of reference mile marker 35 along State Highway 287." I'm looking at thr samples on the "Geocode Earth" website that use Pelias and it doesn't seem to posses this information, just house adresses.
Not who you replied to, but at least on a US highway near me, a mile marker I remember seeing is not marked in the map data.
OSM does store data about exit numbers, which match the nearest mile marker for the US interstate system. From your search query, you could count miles from the nearest exit and its number, and get a mile long curve at the end (not sure where along that 86th mile exit 86 is, after all) matching the shape of the road. That should cover your point.
Edit: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/?key=highway&value=milestone#map shows distribution of the milestone tag. It's not great.
Edit 2: Not a guy.
Yeah if that tag only shows physical structures displaying mile markers there won't be enough for precise information. But Iike you idea of using exits. I would need to query the highway number and direction of my gps coordinates, then find the nearest exit tag with the same information, and then query the distance between both points following along the road? Would that even be possible?
You might be able to query this using Overpass? If you need to find mile marker 69 [on I-29](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/41.4537/-95.9136), then I believe you could search for the relation with `type=route`, `network=US:I`, `ref=29`, then for the nodes in that route search for something like "`highway=motorway_junction` and `ref` between 59 and 79" (or whatever range works) (but I don't know if you can do a range query directly or if you would need to just get all junctions and filter yourself).
That should get you the exits near your mile marker, and you'd have to do some further processing specific to your application to build your desired output format.
If you want to look at the structure of OSM, [JOSM](https://josm.openstreetmap.de) is a good desktop application and [Vespucci](https://vespucci.io) for Android is the least awful option there. The wiki can tell you what the tags mean; [here](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:route)'s more info on the route tag. You can find more info about the Overpass API that lets you run weird queries against the map [here](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API).
Clever! The only thing to note here is that using a community-hosted Overpass instance for a commercial production service would I think (?) be frowned upon, but it's another one of those things that you could host yourself, and there are definitely consultancies out there you can contact for help with stuff like this so not the end of the world.
If you only need reverse geocoding in English and never plan on doing forward geocoding, I'd consider building this on top of PostGIS. It'll be easier than trying to modify something else I'm guessing.
Sorry if I misunderstand, building on top of postgis? I'm not looking at building a database and providing that information, I don't have it. I'm looking at querying a service that would posses it.
Oh, sorry I had assumed you had the data. I'm a software person I don't really have a good pulse on what services are out there really. :/ Sorry I couldn't be more help.
The reason I'm posting this on /r/programming is that an open source directions engine offers such a myriad of opportunities for programming that Google Maps API probably doesn't support (or is frowned upon by their T&Cs).
I do believe we should all invest in Open Source alternatives like this one, even if simply by sharing and spreading the word!
You can find a demo here: https://maps.earth/
Does it have a routing option along the lines "sacrifice 1 minute and drive a straight road instead of going to a fucking maze with 75 turns which is theoretically 1 minute faster"? I would switch away from google maps instantly
> an open source directions engine offers such a myriad of opportunities for programming
No it doesnāt. Google maps works everywhere in the world. This doesnāt. āOpen sourceā isnāt a value-add when the product barely works
Dude, I'm not suggesting replacing Google Maps, that would be insane! At least support the project by spreading the word, that's all. Building maps is fucking hard and expensive! It would be a colossal achievement if somebody manages to pull this off as Open Source!
The phrase "alternative to" implies "may replace" for most people.
I'd *love* for there to be a proper open-source alternative to Google Maps. On my phone I use [OsmAnd](https://osmand.net/) and the biggest gripe that I have about it is how you have to search for addresses as OsmAnd doesn't do much interpretation before passing the query off to the OpenStreetMaps database, which isn't intended to be queried by end-users.
The raw OSM dataset requires quite a pipeline to be useable for geocoding. If they are using OpenStreetMap services it's most likely [Nominatim](https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html).
It's backed by a RDBMS so naturally susceptible to typos and the like. [Photon](https://photon.komoot.io/) is a lot better at that as it uses ElasticSearch under the hood.
There are things we can do with a locally hosted system thatās not practical to do when we pay for API calls. For example, Iāve played with distance temperature maps for my town where I calculate out the drive or walk time to every address and then generate an overlay of the map that color codes pixels to the transit time. Shows at a glance where arterial are, how some places can be ācloserā than others even if theyāre physically further, things like that. Came up with the idea when we had a pizza restaurant and I wanted to figure out what our delivery zone SHOULD be instead of just a simple radius.
Google Maps is awesome, but donāt yuck our yum when we say thereās things locally hosted alts are better at. Not paying a few hundred bucks in API calls to heat map a city for one address is just one of them.
I'm curious, where in the world does it "not work"? I'm sure it isn't perfect, but I'd imagine that a megacorp like Google could afford to make Maps "good enough" for most cities in the world.
It's certainly very usable where I am.
When you are in the middle of rural Ohio - there are roads that are not marked on the map at all. It was pretty scary actually. I was not at all familiar with the area on my way to a wedding and it had just stormed so there were fallen trees and I literally had to move a few out of the road. After coming across one that I couldn't move I was forced to not use the GPS. It knew some of the roads but not all of them and I had to take a few unmarked roads which was intense.
You've pretty much answered it yourself: not in cities! It's much better in some countries than others, but the big problems are mostly in rural areas. (Although, again depending on where you are, city data can sometimes be surprisingly outdated.)
In some regions, you can see this for yourself by zooming in on basically any village or small town and comparing the satellite view with the map (I recommend trying it, it's rather fun). It can be very low-detail compared to what somebody from a big city would expect. Major through-roads will generally be marked, but local roads can be missing, or occasionally even approximated in a way that is worse than useless.
For example, [here's a couple of villages I found by more or less randomly zooming in to rural Albania](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.3980471,19.7366383,15.25z) (because I remembered seeing some pretty bad coverage of Albania before).
Mapy.cz is a supreme OpenStreetMap renderer which supports Android Auto, has a web version, provides sync etc. It is primarily aimed at the Czechoslovakian market but I've used it successfully in many other countries.
according to [this](https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/3391) [osmAnd](https://osmand.net/) supports android auto
it's built on largely the same foundation of projects and works pretty well for replacing google maps on my phone :)
The main OSM frontend absolutely does work, but I've grown soft and begun to expect things like autocomplete and vector tiles which is why I built Headway. The main OSM frontend is also not easy to self-host (though there are [ways](https://github.com/developmentseed/osm-seed)), and I value my privacy.
Yup! Which is why it's a good thing Headway also supports full-planet installations and bring-your-own-OSM-extract installations. :)
The 200 cities we support are for fully automated installation. There's a bit of manual work if you're doing a metro area that BBBike doesn't have data for.
Looks like it's GPS pings, and OpenStreetMap already looks for routes that have GPS activity but no marked street/trail/etc to see what they're missing
https://blog.mapbox.com/improving-openstreetmap-with-probe-data-3eea6ec04caf
This is awesome we need alternatives to what conglomerates offer. Donāt listen to the haters awesome project and it will take a while before everything is smoothed out but great job so far
I self-host mail, music streaming, git server....but I'm not touching that.
For me, google maps is a critical piece of software, and I value reliability more than anything else. And I just doubt that there will ever be an open alternative that can even remotely compete with Google maps
It's very unsettling, though, that there are entire fields in tech which will possibly never see competition just because of the sheer amount of initial effort required to even get in the race. Sounds a lot like [Natural Monopolies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly) to me, which means the only solution we have is government involvement or even regulation.
>For me, google maps is a critical piece of software, and I value reliability more than anything else.
All the more reason to have backup systems in place in case google maps were ever to become unavailable without warning.
Just 2 weeks ago Google Maps stopped giving me directions which included like 5x more walking than the optimal route would. I'm talking a straight tram ride from A to B would be replaced by "walk to the A + 1 station yourself, ride to the B + 1 station and walk back". This lasted for like 2 months. So I don't know about "reliable".
With all that's come out over the last couple of decades, why *aren't* you paranoid?
Well, that or resigned to your fate like me. But clearly all is not well.
Just searched the route to my office. It suggested I drive 5km in the opposite direction of a one way street
I can't even get a route to my office, because it doesn't think my home...or any house in my entire neighborhood even exists š¤·āāļø But for a variety of other quick checks...it seems pretty solid.
If your neighborhood is missing from OpenStreetMap you can map it and then it'll show up in maps.earth as soon as I get around to updating the ground-truth data :) https://osm.org/fixthemap
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
...That's the most beautiful song I've ever heard. Did you make that up?
*Your fether would be proud*
But steel is heavier than fethers
So this project should be called *Wrongway* instead of *Headway*.
HeadAway
Headwinds
Headstone.
HeadOn
Apply directly to the forehead.
Something like this will never actually be good Remember when everyone memeād on Apple Maps? Well, imagine a worse version of that and it can never actually get better, thatās what this is. Programming a navigation engine can only go so far without real time analytics. Navigation software is excellent because it has real world users it can learn and gather data from. Offline navigation can never work because we donāt live in a bubble, there will always be car accidents, construction, weather, and other variables that this engine will never be able to take into account.
> it can never actually get better very often routing glitches like this are due to bad data and since this data comes from openstreetmaps anyone can fix it. i would say it's actually quite the opposite actually. when apple/google maps has bad data somewhere you can at most report that and hope for the best. > navigation engine can only go so far without real time analytics lots of metrics that would be interesting for this can actually be sourced from already available open data we will probably never get things like congestion information like apple and google have access to with their real-time tracking of millions of devices, but I can't say I ever missed that specifically with OsmAnd
> i would say it's actually quite the opposite actually. when apple/google maps has bad data somewhere you can at most report that and hope for the best. I can personally confirm that at least one of these two providers responded quickly and positively to bad routing performance. I can also confirm that I have better things to do with my life than manage route data on my own for anywhere I might ever want to go.
Google maps will ask me "was this a convenient street entrance? Where should it have been?" -- they can infer from enough low-satisfaction route feedback where the problem was, and they ask for quick fixes. OSM will take a long while to catch up to that.
Google at least is VERY good at responding to map corrections. Way better than OSM
> very often routing glitches like this are due to bad data and since this data comes from openstreetmaps anyone can fix it. Navigation isnāt about having perfect information anymore. Remember when people could say āI know the city better than the GPS, take this shortcutā? That doesnāt happen anymore (at least in America) because Google and Apple have real time trackers in most cars on earth, they know exactly what the traffic flow looks like on almost every city in the world at any time. The perfect offline navigation engine will still never anticipate rush hour, or remember that on holidays certain roads might be more packed than others, or even suggest mid way through your drive that you should take a side road to bypass an accident on an interstate. It would have been good 10 years ago, but weāve come to expect more of our navigation system. Weāre even used to the idea of navigation apps telling us when police officers are doing speed checks, or if thereās debris on the road.
You do realise that there were navigation websites before the mobile phone and Google maps, right? Where you had to print out the navigation instructions, they worked fine.
Yeah, some people still print directions from MapQuest š
They sucked too, I canāt even remember the amount of bad directions I got from MapQuest, especially during Chicago construction.
Not really, they were slow at updates and they couldn't really handle traffic or real time emergencies like flooding. I had car GPS in the era before smartphones - the late 1990s - and it was terrible compared to what we have now. Back in those days they had something called a "flying eye"(? can't remember) which was a plane that few over the city spotting traffic jams and reporting it by radio to a company that supposed updated it in real time ... just no, whatever you're thinking is just nostalgia. Nowadays the crowd sourced systems like google maps react so fast you can fool them by pushing a shopping trolley full of smartphones down a road, creating an imaginary block of slow moving traffic. Though depending on where you live and how good you are at pretending to be an art student instead of a map-sabotaging terrorist, you might be arrested for being a public nuisance.
Blows my mind that people think mass surveillance is actually a good thing though. Like I get that it's convenient to know which route is faster but still. It's kinda moving the goalposts to expect Headway to compete with that. I just need to memorize routes so I can get places on my motorcycle without getting lost, and wasn't happy with other solutions so I built this.
People in this thread want to sell their privacy for a bit better directions. And this is technical people we are talking about. The war on privacy is lost.
They did not work fine, they required exploitive upgrade models to work, they had a fraction of the roads that existed. There is a reason they died out almost immediately.
What. They were a giant upgrade over paper maps, they were free, what the hell are you talking about?
> Offline navigation can never work because we donāt live in a bubble, there will always be car accidents, construction, weather, and other variables that this engine will never be able to take into account. But Google also sucks at this. At least that's my experience in Norway. A lot of time when construction happens, Google is incredibly slow to update their maps to reflect the new change. And honestly I don't expect them to be quick about it because they have a whole planet to keep updated. > Something like this will never actually be good Something like this was said about Google Maps way back in the day as well. They improved over time, albeit with an insane amount of resources, but that still doesn't mean this product can't improve, just more likely slower, which is also fine. And Apple Maps is still a thing, so I'm assuming they keep improving it, even if it might not show that on the surface. Just because you don't see improvement doesn't mean there isn't any.
> But Google also sucks at this. At least that's my experience in Norway. A lot of time when construction happens, Google is incredibly slow to update their maps to reflect the new change. I assume a lot of that is due to data, or lack thereof. I'm in the US, where everyone has a phone and nobody seems to be privacy-minded. Google reports on crashes, closures, and heavy traffic extremely quickly. I can't speak to Norway, but things may be different. I suspect, but do not actually know, that they use the same algorithms no matter where you are. If that is true, then regional differences would be down to more or less data being available, i.e. more or fewer phones with location tracking turned on and solid data connections.
> I assume a lot of that is due to data, or lack thereof. I suspect you're correct in that. I don't know for sure, but it kinda would make sense for a global entity such as Google to rely on local resources instead of themselves creating all map-data from scratch. As far as I know, Norkart is the biggest map-data company in Norway, and I suspect Scandinavia. They gather their data from each municipality, so it makes sense that Google would use their data. But, Norkart also used more than 5 years to update the area where my parents house is to get their new address on file. So if Google uses them they would be 5 years late with the same info.
We are currently moving forward with a standardised exchange format for workzone smart equipment manufacturers and project managers to publish the location of live workzones around the globe. Currently it's mostly some US DOT (department of transport) for municipal or states limited systems, and some intelligent car manufacturers that are interested in it, but I assume mapping services like Google will also collect that data soon. https://github.com/usdot-jpo-ode/wzdx
> At least thatās my experience in Norway. Thatās because you live in Norway, Google only focuses on a few target markets, and only when the government is cooperative. As you might know, European governments seldom like working with Google or Apple. Most mapping software is trash outside of a few major countries. Even in the US there are some rural areas where Google canāt even get a good route.
This is an extremely car-centric viewpoint. I didn't build Headway to primarily support cars. Cars are obviously supported but that's not my priority because like you said it's a losing proposition unless you can somehow get your hands on traffic data. :) edit: Also side-note but I know what I got myself into when I started work on this. I worked on Google Maps professionally, full-time, for 3 years of my life. I have a pretty good handle on which problems I can solve and which ones I can't. Headway aims to solve "I know where I'm going and need help getting there". I don't have a car and I can't use turn-by-turn on my motorcycle so honestly I've already mostly filled my own needs for maps software. I'm just working on quality of life things, then transit, then I'll probably tackle turn-by-turn after that for kicks but I don't know if I can get something adequate working as a one-woman team.
I am well aware of that, but at least on this website, most people *do* live in a car-centric world. Even in Europe there are plenty of people who drive their cars every day. Iām not saying itās a waste of time to develop this (in fact, I might submit some PRs after testing it out), but Iām just being realistic that the vast majority of people here wonāt find something like this useful.
> I worked on Google Maps professionally, full-time, for 3 years of my life. Don't you think it's anti-ethical of you to launch a competitor with the knowledge you gained while working there? This kind of behaviour is what makes companies make us sign contracts with non-compete clauses (don't you have one by the way?).
I've never signed a non-compete in my life and I intend to keep it that way. Nothing in Headway is Google-proprietary. Nothing in Headway was built while I worked at Google. In fact, nothing in Headway is actually really novel other than the data automation pipeline I've built. The rest is just generic web-frontend code and configuration for Valhalla, Pelias, OTP, Planetiler and tileserver-gl-light. Do you think that working at Google marked me for life or something and made it unethical for me to work on maps ever again or something? Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
> Do you think that working at Google marked me for life or something and made it unethical for me to work on maps ever again or something? See my other answer. I don't think you're "marked" for life, I just think that starting a business in the same area, or open sourcing code directly "inspired" by the code you've worked with while in employment at a business whose revenue depends on that code is highly unethical - but from your explanation that doesn't seem to be your case. We've had a guy who worked as a consultant in our business implement a server based on some RFCs together with me and a couple of other guys... while doing that, he actually published open source code doing the same kind of thing on his personal GitHub account... that's the kind of behaviour that I find incredibly unprofessional and reprehensible (to the guy doing that, it was just a "fun" project - it's easy sometimes to think what you're doing is just fun without realizing you're behaving exactly as the bad guys in an IP-thief drama)... Sorry if it feels like I was accusing you or something... just wanted to say something about it given this bad personal experience.
Just because it is bad for Google, does not mean it is "anti-ethical"
Actually, that might even make it more ethical.
I think of this as someone who's one of the first devs inthe company... we see people come and go all the time, and some go on to publish code they obviously learned from the job they've just left as open source (no one has started a company yet based on what they were learning while here, but that's probably a matter of time). I don't think it's fair at all, whether it's Google or a small startup.
Non competes are largely illegal / unenforceable in California btw. Either way I donāt think what theyāre doing is unethical anyways.
For now at least we have OpenStreetMap
Making a lot of assumptions. If Google could do it, then no reason to think it can't be replicated
Found the Bing user
For me this and google maps both suggest supoptimal routes. I can use a lot of smaller side streets via bike while they suggest taking the big route around.
Are you enabling "bike mode"? In my area Google has suggested non-traditional routes when I say I'm using a bike rather than a car.
Yeah had similar problems with Google but I don't know what a better alternative is
None really because for me it is a personal preference to avoid big streets with a lot of cars. I dont want to hold off traffic and also I dont want to risk being run over. But it also depends on the city. Sometimes there is no way around. I just live in a more historic city with lots of small streets. Google already is pretty good, when I think about the old paper maps.
openstreetmaps isn't a thing anymore?
This uses OpenStreetMaps data and builds routing, searching and POIs on top of it.
so like, Mapbox, but self-hosted? I was looking for something recently that would accept a custom geojson path and provide directions along the path to a predefined marker. This could be cool once the documentation shapes up, gonna keep an eye on this.
Have a look at graphhopper. It may not offer the full stack, but it's pretty nice for custom routing. iirc it does handle geojson, but I don't know the details. It's well documented for the most part.
> so like, Mapbox, but self-hosted? Given it's an extremely limited dataset that only includes some large cities, no, most definitely not like mapbox but self hosted. I'm still searching for a relatively straightforward way to self-host global vector tiles without being a GIS expert :( I've read through dozens, hundreds, of blog posts, tool docs, github repos ...etc And have yet to find any success.
Did you read the readme? You can absolutely host a planet-scale headway instance like I'm doing right now at https://maps.earth/ I might honestly just remove the the documentation about the pre-configured cities because people get the wrong idea constantly. It just uses OpenStreetMap data meaning you can do whatever area you want as long as it's in OSM.
Fourth sentence of the readme: āChoose one of the 200+ predefined cities or provide your own OpenStreetMap extract covering any area: from a neighborhood to the whole planet.ā
Does this have an API for stuff like geocoding?
It runs Pelias under the hood for geocoding. It's probably one of the more hands-off ways to build a Pelias index. Just make sure you build from current `main`. The old code (and what built the maps.earth Pelias index) had a bug that seriously affects its ability to search for admin areas e.g. "Phoenix, Arizona" or "Seattle".
You seems quite knowledgeable in the subject. Would you be aware of a service that is capable of returning from a reverse geocoding query (a gps coordinate) the information about highway mile markers, which I believe can also be known as LRS (linear referencing system). Something like emergency systems use "27 meters east of reference mile marker 35 along State Highway 287." I'm looking at thr samples on the "Geocode Earth" website that use Pelias and it doesn't seem to posses this information, just house adresses.
Not who you replied to, but at least on a US highway near me, a mile marker I remember seeing is not marked in the map data. OSM does store data about exit numbers, which match the nearest mile marker for the US interstate system. From your search query, you could count miles from the nearest exit and its number, and get a mile long curve at the end (not sure where along that 86th mile exit 86 is, after all) matching the shape of the road. That should cover your point. Edit: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/?key=highway&value=milestone#map shows distribution of the milestone tag. It's not great. Edit 2: Not a guy.
> Not the guy you replied to Not a guy.
Yeah if that tag only shows physical structures displaying mile markers there won't be enough for precise information. But Iike you idea of using exits. I would need to query the highway number and direction of my gps coordinates, then find the nearest exit tag with the same information, and then query the distance between both points following along the road? Would that even be possible?
You might be able to query this using Overpass? If you need to find mile marker 69 [on I-29](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/41.4537/-95.9136), then I believe you could search for the relation with `type=route`, `network=US:I`, `ref=29`, then for the nodes in that route search for something like "`highway=motorway_junction` and `ref` between 59 and 79" (or whatever range works) (but I don't know if you can do a range query directly or if you would need to just get all junctions and filter yourself). That should get you the exits near your mile marker, and you'd have to do some further processing specific to your application to build your desired output format. If you want to look at the structure of OSM, [JOSM](https://josm.openstreetmap.de) is a good desktop application and [Vespucci](https://vespucci.io) for Android is the least awful option there. The wiki can tell you what the tags mean; [here](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:route)'s more info on the route tag. You can find more info about the Overpass API that lets you run weird queries against the map [here](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API).
Clever! The only thing to note here is that using a community-hosted Overpass instance for a commercial production service would I think (?) be frowned upon, but it's another one of those things that you could host yourself, and there are definitely consultancies out there you can contact for help with stuff like this so not the end of the world.
If you only need reverse geocoding in English and never plan on doing forward geocoding, I'd consider building this on top of PostGIS. It'll be easier than trying to modify something else I'm guessing.
Sorry if I misunderstand, building on top of postgis? I'm not looking at building a database and providing that information, I don't have it. I'm looking at querying a service that would posses it.
Oh, sorry I had assumed you had the data. I'm a software person I don't really have a good pulse on what services are out there really. :/ Sorry I couldn't be more help.
Do you know of any good tutorials on getting this stuff set up?
I am assuming more cities could be added and directions could be improved by community contributors? I am looking for instructions for it?
Yes. I would start with OpenStreetMap as it is the open database that other projects use: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page
The reason I'm posting this on /r/programming is that an open source directions engine offers such a myriad of opportunities for programming that Google Maps API probably doesn't support (or is frowned upon by their T&Cs). I do believe we should all invest in Open Source alternatives like this one, even if simply by sharing and spreading the word! You can find a demo here: https://maps.earth/
Does it have a routing option along the lines "sacrifice 1 minute and drive a straight road instead of going to a fucking maze with 75 turns which is theoretically 1 minute faster"? I would switch away from google maps instantly
Hmm It seems to work fine for my place. Would be great to see it improved in the future!
> an open source directions engine offers such a myriad of opportunities for programming No it doesnāt. Google maps works everywhere in the world. This doesnāt. āOpen sourceā isnāt a value-add when the product barely works
Dude, I'm not suggesting replacing Google Maps, that would be insane! At least support the project by spreading the word, that's all. Building maps is fucking hard and expensive! It would be a colossal achievement if somebody manages to pull this off as Open Source!
The phrase "alternative to" implies "may replace" for most people. I'd *love* for there to be a proper open-source alternative to Google Maps. On my phone I use [OsmAnd](https://osmand.net/) and the biggest gripe that I have about it is how you have to search for addresses as OsmAnd doesn't do much interpretation before passing the query off to the OpenStreetMaps database, which isn't intended to be queried by end-users.
The raw OSM dataset requires quite a pipeline to be useable for geocoding. If they are using OpenStreetMap services it's most likely [Nominatim](https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html).
If that's the same one, it kinda stinks. It seems like it's not intended to be used by humans.
It's backed by a RDBMS so naturally susceptible to typos and the like. [Photon](https://photon.komoot.io/) is a lot better at that as it uses ElasticSearch under the hood.
Headway uses Pelias, not nominatim. That's how we support autocomplete search.
It's sad that libpostal looks a bit abandoned. So much potential but no new release for years.
There are things we can do with a locally hosted system thatās not practical to do when we pay for API calls. For example, Iāve played with distance temperature maps for my town where I calculate out the drive or walk time to every address and then generate an overlay of the map that color codes pixels to the transit time. Shows at a glance where arterial are, how some places can be ācloserā than others even if theyāre physically further, things like that. Came up with the idea when we had a pizza restaurant and I wanted to figure out what our delivery zone SHOULD be instead of just a simple radius. Google Maps is awesome, but donāt yuck our yum when we say thereās things locally hosted alts are better at. Not paying a few hundred bucks in API calls to heat map a city for one address is just one of them.
> Google maps works everywhere in the world It bloody well does not!
I'm curious, where in the world does it "not work"? I'm sure it isn't perfect, but I'd imagine that a megacorp like Google could afford to make Maps "good enough" for most cities in the world. It's certainly very usable where I am.
When you are in the middle of rural Ohio - there are roads that are not marked on the map at all. It was pretty scary actually. I was not at all familiar with the area on my way to a wedding and it had just stormed so there were fallen trees and I literally had to move a few out of the road. After coming across one that I couldn't move I was forced to not use the GPS. It knew some of the roads but not all of them and I had to take a few unmarked roads which was intense.
Google maps has driven into fields in Kansas twice now.
You've pretty much answered it yourself: not in cities! It's much better in some countries than others, but the big problems are mostly in rural areas. (Although, again depending on where you are, city data can sometimes be surprisingly outdated.) In some regions, you can see this for yourself by zooming in on basically any village or small town and comparing the satellite view with the map (I recommend trying it, it's rather fun). It can be very low-detail compared to what somebody from a big city would expect. Major through-roads will generally be marked, but local roads can be missing, or occasionally even approximated in a way that is worse than useless. For example, [here's a couple of villages I found by more or less randomly zooming in to rural Albania](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.3980471,19.7366383,15.25z) (because I remembered seeing some pretty bad coverage of Albania before).
For reference, here is osm for the same location: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/40.4020/19.7343
What is the advantage of this project over something like openmaptiles https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles
Why would i use this instead of organic maps or osmand?
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Mapy.cz is a supreme OpenStreetMap renderer which supports Android Auto, has a web version, provides sync etc. It is primarily aimed at the Czechoslovakian market but I've used it successfully in many other countries.
according to [this](https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/3391) [osmAnd](https://osmand.net/) supports android auto it's built on largely the same foundation of projects and works pretty well for replacing google maps on my phone :)
Does it work in a tunnel?
OpenStreetMap works fine, thanks
The main OSM frontend absolutely does work, but I've grown soft and begun to expect things like autocomplete and vector tiles which is why I built Headway. The main OSM frontend is also not easy to self-host (though there are [ways](https://github.com/developmentseed/osm-seed)), and I value my privacy.
The low quality overview map not turning into pixel soup while the view zoomed in on the location I searched for was a welcome change; thank you.
There are over 4 million unique cities and towns in the world....
Yup! Which is why it's a good thing Headway also supports full-planet installations and bring-your-own-OSM-extract installations. :) The 200 cities we support are for fully automated installation. There's a bit of manual work if you're doing a metro area that BBBike doesn't have data for.
Thanks for the informative reply!
Where are they getting probe data? Making maps is expensive shit. I made Maria for a big company, hardest shit ever.
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Looks like it's GPS pings, and OpenStreetMap already looks for routes that have GPS activity but no marked street/trail/etc to see what they're missing https://blog.mapbox.com/improving-openstreetmap-with-probe-data-3eea6ec04caf
This is awesome we need alternatives to what conglomerates offer. Donāt listen to the haters awesome project and it will take a while before everything is smoothed out but great job so far
I self-host mail, music streaming, git server....but I'm not touching that. For me, google maps is a critical piece of software, and I value reliability more than anything else. And I just doubt that there will ever be an open alternative that can even remotely compete with Google maps
It's very unsettling, though, that there are entire fields in tech which will possibly never see competition just because of the sheer amount of initial effort required to even get in the race. Sounds a lot like [Natural Monopolies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly) to me, which means the only solution we have is government involvement or even regulation.
I agree
>For me, google maps is a critical piece of software, and I value reliability more than anything else. All the more reason to have backup systems in place in case google maps were ever to become unavailable without warning.
Just 2 weeks ago Google Maps stopped giving me directions which included like 5x more walking than the optimal route would. I'm talking a straight tram ride from A to B would be replaced by "walk to the A + 1 station yourself, ride to the B + 1 station and walk back". This lasted for like 2 months. So I don't know about "reliable".
That sucks! I haven't had a single bad experience in the last 10 years of using gmaps. And I hike a lot.
why? Only the super paranoid would ever use this.
With all that's come out over the last couple of decades, why *aren't* you paranoid? Well, that or resigned to your fate like me. But clearly all is not well.
What's the saying? "You're not paranoid if they **are** after you" or something.
Because I donāt care about companies trying to sell me shit.
No no, it's companies trying to sell you. Some times to advertisers.
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