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by soc88 5272 days ago
I wonder in which part of the world you are living. OSM has in most parts of the world outpaced even the best, commercial map providers...
2 comments

Yes, but the data can be pretty bad, and software to access that data could use some improvement. For geocoding, there is only Nominatim which is a major PITA to get setup. I am still trying to get a full planet import and it has been 30 days on an 8 core 16gb machine with 6 drives in RAID10. Without 64gb of ram and some SSD's, it's going to take a month. Additionally, the results can really really suck. For example, zipcodes are often returned as "97006:97015", a range, rather than as a point. On top of that, sometimes you get the range delimited by a semicolon rather than a colon, etc. The price you pay for user inputted data - there's lots of it, but it's not all quality. Still though, better than paying an arm and a leg!
Providence, Rhode Island. Does OSM provide transit stop and route info?
OpenStreetMap is capable of providing public transport information - see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport

See http://3liz.fr/public/osmtransport/index.php?country=France&... and http://öpnvkarte.de/?zoom=12&lat=52.50944&lon=13.393... for examples of OpenStreetMap public transport data in action.