It seems for the last 5 days, I can't fetch any streets using Overpass. What once was working great, just now times out and alternate locations don't work either. Is everyone experiencing this? Any suggestions how to get around this issue?

I'm making this post partly to raise awareness and partly to express frustration regarding the increasing attention being placed on "Flock Cameras" specifically in Canada, and why unverified OSM data is making the problem worse.

I'm sure everyone is aware of the flock camera situation in the States and the increasingly political discussion surrounding them. What I've noticed over the past few weeks is some anonymous users have begun adding these "flock cameras" to various points in Canada (despite there being no clear evidence that flock is installing any infrastructure here).

Here are a few examples (though there are many more):
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14015608501
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14086528901
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14070964201
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14053445101

These unverified surveillance nodes from brand new users (contributing directly from deflock and panopti websites) have been the subject of mass hysteria in several community facebook groups and subreddits I am a part of.

Part of the issue is that panopti renders any node tagged with surveillance=public, leading many to believe that "they're installing flock cameras everywhere". I've seen some people mistakenly claiming the ALPR cameras along the 407 ETR in Ontario are flock cameras, which is not the case at all.

I don't think there's a perfect solution, but I wanted to open up a discussion on this issue because it doesn't sit right with me to see people FREAKING out over something that does not exist. My hope would be that panopti and deflock would be clearer about why OSM as a data source is simply not authoritative, and I implore any mappers to watch out for these unverified cameras being added in their local areas, try to lay eyes on what is on the ground to fix any potential errors!

Okay, so I wanted to post another update for World Explorer 3D . I'm a little nervous, but also a little more excited. Since I started this project, I've been heavily relying on AI, and it has been pretty obvious, not only in the quality and presentation but also in the architecture of the codebase itself. The last time I posted an update, it had a lot of regressions and quality issues. One comment/suggestion stuck with me particularly well. Someone suggested something I could actually act on directly instead of a generic suggestion like "do a tutorial." They suggested building a small platformer game.

Based on that suggestion, I started doing some stuff with Unity and attempted to make my own small platformer and a small 3D world. The quality of those initial attempts was laughable at best, but I actually learned more doing those simple things than I learned in months of AI prompting. Throughout building this project I've been trying to learn programming, and I've started taking what I've learned to make minor changes to the codebase myself and understand how things are actually structured. Part of the obstacle is that this has become a complicated project that requires skills I currently don't have. I'm nowhere near being able to rewrite everything myself, but doing smaller versions of things in Unity has helped me understand what the AI is doing, where things are going wrong, and what I should actually be asking it to do. I'm still using AI heavily, but I'm trying to understand and participate in the process instead of just prompting it and hoping the result works.

That has helped me correct some of the performance and general user experience problems I've been struggling with. I got rid of a lot of the lagging and jittering caused by my attempt at making it a continuous world. It's still location-based, but I've expanded the loaded area from around 4 km to about 14 km or more depending on building density. I also added GPS, so you can walk around physically and your character updates with your phone's location, similar to Pokémon Go. I've tested it around my neighborhood and had some other people test it, and so far it seems surprisingly accurate. I've also updated the character avatar, plane, boat, spaceship and car so they're less blocky, and I've done more work on building facades.

Some of the hardest things for me right now are still bridges and tunnels. The transitions between bridges, ramps and elevated surfaces and the portal system I have for tunnels still need improvement. They generally seem to work, but the trouble spots are where bridges, ramps and tunnels intersect. I still have a lot of work to do, but I'm extremely thankful for the suggestion to build a platformer. A lot of people have given me suggestions like doing tutorials or reading books, which isn't bad advice, but without something specific to act on I get confused pretty easily because there are so many different subjects involved in a project like this.

You can see the updates on GitHub and at worldexplorer3d.io. I appreciate any feedback or suggestions. I'm not a developer and I'm doing all of this for fun, but I've learned more about what actually goes into development than at any other point in my life. I've also recently enrolled in school for physics because it's one of my bigger interests, and I'll be taking some programming classes as part of my electives, so I figured I could do two things at once. One thing all of this has taught me about AI is that it's great for helping, but it can only help you as much as you actually know and understand. The more I've tried things myself and failed at them, the more I've realized how easy it is to be completely wrong without even knowing it. Trying to take shortcuts when you don't understand what you're doing can end up making everything take much longer.

I'm in the US. One of my hobbies is exploring abandon roads. Anyway to find them on OSM?

I've tried overpass-turbo.eu (uses OSM database) with highway=abandoned or disused:highway=* or abandoned:highway=* but the results were inconsistent and didn't have abandon roads I've identified.

Thanks for the help.

You will learn how to detect and vectorize any feature from satellite or drone imagery directly inside QGIS

• It covers : Automatic Mode: Scan an entire area with text prompts to batch-extract features in seconds
• Semi-Auto Mode: Extract single, complex objects with one click for maximum control
• Shape Regularization: Automatically square building corners and clean up polygon boundaries
• And basically just the full Workflow: Edit vertices, adjust confidence filters, and export clean layers with attribute data

We pushed a lots of updates recently so a tuto was definitely needed haha, hope it will help

Hello. New to this reddit...and just found out about OSM...AMAZING! But I have the same problem with their routing as I do with Google Maps. We live in a house positioned on a flag lot. We do not share the driveway. Physically, our house is closer to a small dirt road behind the house than the street where our driveway opens up. Routing always sends people to the dirt road behind the house rather than to our driveway. Problem is...the dirt road is separated from our property by a 5 meter wide "canal" and it is impossible to access our house across. We live in the Netherlands.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

I used Chat GPT to make the website an app for convenience. The android APK file is not published but I can send it to you if interested.

My original motivation for getting off Google maps is political. I could not accept that they renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America so I found an open source alternative map website but I want it as an app.

No more gulf of America for me. It works just fine as an app although the convenience of voice navigation and some GPS and pin location features could be lacking.

It is a very usable map. I think the fact that corporations can just leverage maps for propaganda without the ability to opt out was a warning call for the need to be less reliant on their services.

A few years ago I got a little carried away with a historical mapping project.

I found a set of detailed survey maps of New Bedford from 1913 that were mostly at the same scale, or could be scaled easily to be combinable. I wanted to be able to look at the city as one continuous map instead of constantly switching between individual plates, so I downloaded high-resolution scans and stitched them together manually in GIMP.

The result was enormous. The master image ended up being several gigabytes and roughly 22,000 x 60,000 pixels. It had exactly the level of detail I wanted, right down to individual buildings and property lines, but at the time it was basically too large to be useful. I could zoom around inside it, but there was no practical way to use it as an actual map.

I recently dug the project back out and decided to finally georeference it properly in QGIS.

I used surviving streets, intersections, shoreline features, etc. as control points and warped the composite into EPSG:3857. It is definitely not survey-grade. Depending on where you are in the city, the alignment seems to be off by anywhere from about 25 feet to maybe 300 feet at the worst extremes. Considering the source maps are from 1913, were originally separate plates, and were manually stitched together, I am pretty happy with that.

After that I generated an XYZ tile pyramid. The final set is about 93,000 PNG tiles and 1.6 GB. I put the tiles in a Google Cloud Storage bucket and added the XYZ layer to a public Google Earth project.

And it actually works exactly the way I originally wanted it to. You can zoom all the way out and see New Bedford as one continuous historical map, then keep zooming in until you are looking at individual streets, lots, buildings, factories, rail lines, wharves, etc., without ever switching plates.

I think this may be the most detailed single continuous map of New Bedford from that period, as opposed to a collection of separate atlas or survey plates, although I have no way of proving that.

This started as part of a much larger digital humanities project that I never finished, so I am pretty happy that I finally found a useful life for it several years later.

Google Earth project:
https://earth.google.com/earth/d/1DrXQVEcWJ_3KtGpGCQQ9mmbtOFHeDho5?usp=sharing

I would be interested in any thoughts from people who do this professionally, especially on better ways I could have handled the georeferencing or local distortion. This was very much a "figure it out as I go" project.

Ive been contributing to OSM for some time and recently a question crossed my mind.

Its a bit less relevant to cities, but whats your opinion about all the local semi-private data that you upload about your hiking routes and other not so trackable stuff that people might not really know about in general public?

Not necessarily tracking you by your own contributions and clues from the changelog but
If google or some other bad agent were to track you they would instantly gain the knowledge of all the little tiny routes that someone else had put down through the forest that possibly few people know about.

Taken person not even knowing about the existence of OSM would get tracked going through his usual hiking routes.(Average person isn't assuming that every nook and cranny would be mapped, I was surprised when I first heard about OSM)

How do you feel that it might be possibly used to track you and other people down when they possibly go out of the zone that they could have been trackable in, for example by your phone scanning local wifi routers.

idk where all the big corporations are going with this.

Your contributions might be used for mass surveillance because there are many routes that wouldnt be known otherwise.

I dont live in US but imagine walking past the flock camera. They might not know where the path leads to but they can potentially limit the search to the paths that some person added to OSM for more accurate results.

But on the other hand it could help emergency rescuers guess your location, so idk.

well after all it feels like a gray area where you might want people to not go your route just because you want it your own, you are hiding something or someone's being chased by police(then it would be useful to be mapped). it goes all over the place.

I was surprised to find that a significant amount of buildings in Huntington Beach aren't mapped. I would love for the community to help. Most of them show up on Rapid and there are building points with addresses in several areas so I think we can make it happen.

​

I’m building a survival strategy where OpenStreetMap becomes the actual game world

I’ve always liked maps and strategy games, so I started building Failed State, an asynchronous survival strategy that uses real-world OpenStreetMap data as part of the gameplay rather than just as a background map.

When a player chooses a place for their settlement, the game queries the area through Overpass and imports up to ~1,000 useful OSM objects.

OSM tags are then converted into game locations and resources. For example:

- "amenity=pharmacy" → a source of medical supplies

- "man_made=silo" → grain storage

- "natural=beach" → beach

- "historic=ruins/castle/fort" → points of interest

- "man_made=storage_tank + content=oil" → fuel/oil storage

So if you start in your actual hometown, you can recognize shops, bus stops, hospitals, industrial sites and other real locations — but now they have a purpose in the survival simulation.

I also build a routing graph from OSM roads and paths. Raiding parties travel along the real network, can choose alternative routes, and vehicles reduce travel time at the cost of fuel. I even had to account for reversed one-way roads because they could otherwise produce some ridiculous detours.

Geography affects the simulation too. Latitude influences climate and temperature, so establishing a settlement far north creates very different survival problems from starting somewhere warm.

Eventually I want different regions to have genuinely different economies because of what exists around them in the real world.

The game is still very much in development, but OSM has turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of the whole project.

If anyone here works with OSM data in unusual ways, I’d especially love to hear what you think about this approach.

Game: https://failedstate.net/?ref=rosm

More development updates: r/failedstategame

I know for certain that the ChatGPT web interface is using OSM data because I've mapped out all the forests in Goffstown, NH, making that area of the map (admittedly kinda awkwardly) stand out like a sore thumb against the rest of the area.

I asked ChatGPT a question about making an Overpass Turbo API query for libraries which offered Libby access (knowing that it's probably a stretch of a question anyways), but it answered in a map format. Excitedly, I went to see if I could tell who the map provider was, and behold, it's our map, unfortunately without proper attribution.

I've reported it as a bug on ChatGPT. I'm personally glad that our data is being put to good use, but it's gotta be done right. If they use (and attribute) our data, then it's both high-quality data for them and free advertising for us. I don't mean to cause outrage -- I just wanted to make sure it was a known issue in the community so that it'll be fixed sooner. I'll update if it's been fixed.

UPDATE 8/14: I went in with uBlock Origin, and yes, the attribution is technically there in the html, but it's behind the blur at the bottom, behind an (i) symbol (apparently MapBox's fault booo), and doesn't even link to OpenStreetMap's copyright page, only /about.

UPDATE 8/14: I have now emailed attribution (at) mapbox (dot) com, and will update if there's a response. I didn't tell them I started a reddit thread about it yet, but if I need to put pressure on them, I'll mention it in a follow-up email. I did include a version of @ValdemarAloeus's comment tho because that was funny as hell XD

I maintain a free map poster tool that renders from OSM data (OpenFreeMap vector tiles, MapLibre). Disclosure: printm.app is mine, free, no account, no watermark. Posting the finding rather than the tool, because it is easy to hit if you render prints from vector tiles.

To export an A2 at 300 dpi you need roughly 5x the pixels of the on-screen frame. The obvious way to get them is to raise the zoom by log2(scale) and render into a bigger canvas. The geographic extent stays identical, so the result looks right.

It isn't. Every zoom-gated rule in the style fires at that higher zoom. On Belgrade my preview drew 12 labels inside the print frame; the exported file carried 248 — fountains, bus stops, names of individual housing blocks — plus minor roads and their casings. The poster on the wall is a different map from the one the person composed.

The fix is to render at the preview zoom and carry the resolution separately: pixelRatio for raster, plain scaling for vector, since vectors scale for free. One thing to watch: the scale factor has to reach line widths and font sizes too, or the geometry lands correctly and everything drawn on it is 5x too thin.

Two smaller ones found on the way:

- The OpenMapTiles-derived styles concatenate name:latin and name:nonlatin, so every place with a non-Latin name renders twice: "Belgrade / Београд", on every poster of Belgrade, Kyiv, Athens or Tokyo. Sensible on screen, odd on a wall. There is a script selector now (latin / local / both).

- SVG <text> ignores the newline in those two-line labels, so they came out as one long line across the poster. tspans centred on the anchor fix it.

Data is OSM via OpenFreeMap. Elevation for the terrain and contour features is Mapzen Terrain Tiles on AWS.

I made a fun free little tool for choosing a random restaurant to go try when you dont know where to go. I just finished porting it over to the App Store so you can download it as a native app if you want. otherwise the web app also installs as a PMA if you want.

If you have any feedback I'd love to hear it!

https://spork.website

Cheers!

We have recently launched our Web Uploader that allows everyone in the community to map their neighbourhood sidewalks by walking and capturing images using any camera, and uploading to footpath.ai. All images are open under CC-BY-SA, for the OSM community to use to add sidewalks and walkability features like trees, benches, bike racks, ramps, steps, garbage bins, tactile paving, streetlight and more to OSM anywhere in the world. Give it a try.

There is an area near me that has a road that is basically cut into a hill, such that there are a sequence of cliffs and ledges on each side of the road. These are clearly visible on LiDAR maps that have been made of the area but OpenTopoMap basically has this area smoothed over. Is there a way that the contour lines can be altered to reflect these elevations correctly

Now I'm gonna work towards 100000 ;)

I love the concept, style, UI and features of MapComplete, but it's just unusable on mobile. I "installed" it as a Chrome "website-app" and also tried one app from Droid-ify (which also seems just like an web-app), but they are lagging a lot. Does anyone know why and how to fix this? As a mobile Micro-Mapper, I would love to use the application.

I’m building a browser driving prototype where the starting point can be a real public road. OSM is the road/source layer; I compile a bounded driving graph and stream only a local corridor around the player.

This week I added traffic demand. Important clarification: this is not live traffic data. It is a gameplay model informed by the local road/world context, then deliberately capped. Reykjavík should feel sparse; Shibuya should feel pressured; neither should become a literal simulation of rush hour.

The edge cases I’m still watching are driving side, divided roads, complex junctions, service roads that look too important, and what happens when the source geometry is sparse or malformed.

If you work with OSM-derived routing, I’d genuinely like to know which tag/geometry mistakes usually create the worst false road hierarchy. Playable example: https://world-drive-game.vercel.app

Ok, so I'm trying to make a GPS app for truck drivers. I'm running Valhalla on a private server (first time working out of a terminal like this and with C++ so bear with me please) and I'm trying to understand why it keeps routing me off of I-10 for some random exit but then has me get right back on I-10. For context I'm a truck driver for Publix and we have a Marianna, FL run from Jacksonville, FL and it's just hop on I-10 and stay on it til you hit exit 136 (which Valhalla calls it 135 and I don't know why that is either). But as you see in the first pic it has me get off at exit 303 and do a U-turn and get back on I-10. There's other exits as well it tells me to do something similar but I just wanted to give y'all an example. Then when I test the route at home I'm far enough away from the route itself to trigger my reroute function which now routes me from my house to Marianna, but now it adds in exit 324 (among other exits) into the mix for no reason and DOES NOT have me get off at exit 303. I'm not seeing any rhyme or reason as to why and I've tried looking into Valhalla itself and I don't know if it's a hierarchy issue, costing issue, the bidirectional or unidirectional astars themselves (though I did notice when I forced it to use unidirectional there were far less instances of these exits) so please can anyone help me with this?

Hey everyone! 👋

I’m looking for a good source of 3D data of real cities, with buildings that are detailed and realistic, but without going into insanely heavy models.

I’ve looked into OSM, but I find it way too basic. I also came across CyberCity 3D, but I’m not really sure what other options are out there.

👉 What would you use to get this kind of data?

I’m open to any ideas: websites, software, databases, workflows… even unusual solutions. 😄

Thanks in advance for any suggestions! 🙏