[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".