[mailslot]

Open Streetmap doesn’t build laser scanning drones, or fleets of connected 360 camera vehicles, or the tech and infrastructure to do the mapping. SOMEONE has to build all of that. It can’t be free. If it’s govt funded, then there WILL be corruption, scams, and it’ll be run as well as the DMV.

[orf]

Because the private sector is free of corruption and scams?

The UK ordnance survey[1] is government run and is generally fantastic. They cover every inch of the UK in excruciating detail, provide centimeter precise GPS coordinates for everything and publish invaluable, cheap maps of it all. Why do you assume that the seemingly inept and corrupt US standard is the baseline that everything else will be?

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey

[londons_explore]

Their maps were probably world-leading in the 90's.

Now though, I feel like the tech giants have overtaken them.

Where is the street view or 3d models? Where are the opening times of every shop? Where is the traffic congestion info? Where is the ability to look up a house number and find where on the street it is?

These are all things I regularly want to know and are location based, so really ought to be part of a mapping service.

[SahAssar]

> street view

That will probably never get done in a OSS manner at the scale of google, and even if it was serving it would probably be enormously expensive.

> 3d models

A lot of 3d models are in OSM, although not as detailed as in proprietary solutions.

> opening times of every shop

This is not something I want in the same database as the location data. The hope is that more sites/services use discovarable technologies lite microdata to make sure that it can be added to the map via separate databases.

> traffic congestion info

Again, real-time info is not really something I want in the same db as the actual street. traffic congestion info is a very different service than location or mapping info.

> look up a house number

This is part of the OSM offering, look into nominatim

[Aeolun]

UK agencies are recently doing pretty good. UK government however...

[meko]

Many Americans have a baseless distrust of government. Our schools teach us from a very young age that "government bad, founding fathers came here from Britain to escape the evil government".

[lucb1e]

Osm is donation funded. For all your scepticism you could have found that in seconds. People contribute for fun, not because they boss told them to fly this later drone around so their expensive software can process it. That saves a lot of cost. The hardware is nearly free, look at Wikipedia: they beg for your money every few months but of the millions collected, a fraction actually goes to the hosting they imply it's for.

Osm also takes data from governments and other organisations that publish it, but only if it's already available under a compatible free license. Not sure where you see that tie in with corruption (which additionally is much more frequent in the private sector but maybe that depends on your country, but since there are no big bucks flowing in and all financial records are public and are plausible for what they do (I looked through it), the point is moot anyway).

[kiike]

I don't know about laser-scanning drones but for street-level imagery Mapillary and OpenStreetCam do the job. That is, if they have users around the area you're interested in.

[Apaec]

A discussion about Mapillary vs OSC https://github.com/openstreetcam/openstreetcam.org/issues/60

I'll go for OSC for future projects. Thanks for sharing.

[CuriouslyC]

The government is mostly likely to be inefficient if it starts a company by committee and competition is prohibited. If it's just a financial backer for an independent entity, with a lot of strings attached to its support, I don't see why that would be any less efficient than any other business. Perhaps we just need to reexamine how the government gets things done...

[rhn_mk1]

That is all true, but what will solve the problem is making something that's suitable and free, either as part of OSM or in addition to it.

[conception]

Because there's not corruption, scams or poorly run businesses in the private sector?