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Comment on Road crews carry the world on their shoulders. They just aren't given enough to do what needs doing.

I’ll be entirely honest, I’m a big map nerd, looking around the world, different infrastructure, city layout, sprawl Vs density, how manmade interacts with the natural etc etc. I’ll give open street maps a try, but I’ve been using gmaps for a while and Google earth is one of the best things I’ve ever seen

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TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
OSM has a ways to go to be entirely competitive with GMaps as a navigation tool (although it gets the upper hand in other areas). OSM’s major advantages are four-fold:

It’s open to be used by anyone for any reason for free.

It can be contributed to by anyone.

(Crucially) It has a way higher ceiling than GMaps coupd ever hope to have. The level of potential granularity in OSM is absolutely insane. You can mark fire hydrants down to the color, diameter, pressure, and number of couplings. You can mark power lines down to the voltage, shape and material of each individual pole, etc. Individual trees can be marked down to the species. Every street crossing can be marked as having tactile pavings, a type of curb, a material, signals, refuge island, elevated or not, etc. Individual entrances to buildings can be marked as different types. Heights of buildings in meters, whether they have air conditioning, etc., can be marked. This is barely scratching the surface. For navigation, things like this can be superfluous (I would argue that for people with disabilities like blindness, some of these things like the crossing types could be useful), but for research and specific applications, it can in theory crush GMaps rather than just being brought into parity with it.

The non-satellite map is just way, way better. If I look at my neighborhood which is reasonably well-mapped on OSM and then compare it to GMaps and Bing Maps, the latter two look like an absolute joke and rely heavily on satellite imagery to fill in the gaps. The problem with that of course is that not everything is visible from space, and it often gets fuzzy with minute details.
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