Happy Birthday, OpenStreetMap (opens in new tab)

Years ago Tomtom was bullied by microsoft on a patent regarding the use of extended file names on fat-based filesystems. Of course, a popular well-designed device running linux instead of windows CE at the time was not in ms' best interest. Tomtom stood by their position as much as they could and, as time passed, microsoft's bully behavior cooled out.

Congrats for your courage Tomtom! If I ever plan to buy a GPS or navigation device, I'll certainly consider your history.

TomTom provides mapping data to Apple maps, Bing maps and they power many automotive in-dash navigation systems: https://www.tomtom.com/customers/

Very likely they use OpenStreetMaps to enrich their data and it's nice to see that they contribute back.

Worth noting that Steve Coast - the author of this post - was the founder of the OpenStreetMap project in 2004 (he joined TomTom in 2019).

Woo!

Happy to answer any questions...

Many of the red areas I see on the map, particularly in France, are fairly obviously where someone's been running a TomTom while on a train or a boat. Of course that's not going match OSM roads. I'm a little surprised this is not mentioned in the blog post - it seems a bit obvious.

It's great to see corporations contributing to OSM. There's only a couple top contenders for mapping data, and the best way to compete with them is to collaborate on a shared resource.

It seems that the MapMetrics data mentioned either isn't available everywhere or (less likely) their site is being crushed. The data only loads for California and Colorado.

If I may be so bold, scrolling around the Netherlands and what is covered of Germany, it seems pretty useless.

- The resolution is so low, it's really hard to tell if there might be missing roads/routes or if this concerns water/rail.

- There are so many water/rail mistakes, there is red everywhere also in areas where I know every road in existence is on there. You have to evaluate each tile manually for all of the covered landmass.

- Just taking out air/rail/water might not solve the problem. Looking in residential areas with no water or rail nearby, there are still yellow tiles popping up at random with no indication as to why. Having the offending trace(s) would be really helpful here, but those are of course not shareable for privacy reasons. Perhaps short cutouts could be shared that are between 25 and 75% of the route (so not near the source or destination)? That would make it very clear if the person is on a bus (that obviously won't follow the shortest path in most cases) because the trace would go past the bus stops and often linger there, or if it was a cyclist for example.

As a frequent OSM contributor I love such initiatives and I'm very happy to see TomTom getting more involved. TomTom's map quality is so far behind OSM (globally), I was wondering who'd even still considering buying from them so it makes a lot of sense to combine forces instead. User data is the main advantage Google has over OSM, for both live traffic and purposes like these, so I'm very happy to see innovation here! I'll definitely be checking out updates to the site.

This is cool data! ...however, I must ask --- where does the data come from?

HN certainly has a side that loves open-source data, but it also has a privacy-loving side. Focusing on the privacy aspects, has TomTom given any consideration to how it respects the privacy of its users/does it allow for opt-out of storing and analyzing its users' GPS traces?

Can anyone recommend good interface to OpenStreeMaps? I installed OsmAnd on my Android Radio (9" 720p) and find menu options/icons are too tiny (and too many) to operate while driving.

Osmmaps + leaflet.js = luv

Some years ago you had to pay for updates and they were very slow to add new streets. Has this changed with OSM?

OpenStreetMap is a great product. It's such a shame that they've got licensing wrong. Now a lot of FAANG level companies can abuse it and sell free product with a bloat and trackers.