Hi folks,
Since last August I work at Juno, a ride-sharing service operating in New York
City only, and recently I found out we have something to share with the
OpenStreetMap community. We took all our GPX traces received from drivers and
published these on a tile layer under an open license. Now, instead of one
wobbly track a day on a standard GPS layer, NYC mappers can enable Juno GPS
layer with tens of thousands of tracks — and that is not even the greatest part.
No data on our GPS layer is older than two days. If you see a line over a
closed part of a road, you can be sure a taxi driver rode over it very
recently. No leftover mess from 2009, and no puzzling over which is right, a
satellite imagery or a gpx track. Sure, it is only for New York, but with this
geodata source, we aim to inspire employees of other companies to do the same.
Our map is called street map, so why not have the best, most recent street map
of all?
Of course, one cannot expect from mappers to validate the whole big city daily,
so we have other internal means of map validation. But for a source, this one
should serve as a definitive proof for everything street-related. I hope this
might show you a glipse at a future of OSM mapping sources: when you trace not
a years-old imagery, but a series of super-fresh thematic layers.
And no, we don’t plan to do any automated mapping using this layer. New York is
mapped nearly perfectly: just one out of thousand taxi rides encounters some
minor error, like a wrong turn restriction. I just hope other companies could
provide such validation for other cities they operate in.
See the announcement in the diary:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Zverik/diary/47986
<https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Zverik/diary/47986>
And explore our GPS traces yourself: https://gps-tile.junolab.net/
<https://gps-tile.junolab.net/>
Have a nice mapping time,
Ilya
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