[NateEag]

It's not true.

At least, not exactly.

At its best, the OSM data puts Google to _shame_. Super-fine resolution and details, nuances of street layout precisely correct, mountains of meticulously-maintained metadata that makes manifold niche geospatial apps possible.

Alas, in any given area, OSM is only as good as the union of the publicly-provided street data and the obsessiveness of the area's mappers.

Most towns in central PA, for example, have no street address listed for hundreds of buildings.

I've made many small contributions to help, and really enjoy doing so, but someone looking for driving directions needs to be able to whip out their phone and slap in an address / business name and have it Just Work.

You can't reliably count on OSM for that.

I wind up falling back from OsmAnd to Gmaps probably every fifth drive.

[dmurray]

I suppose Google also has the user-collected data that can tell you which routes are going to be busy. Almost impossible for OSM to replicate that.

[NateEag]

It would be hard, yeah.

It's a network effect thing - if enough people used an OSM client and opted into sharing anonymized location data, you might be able to get somewhere with it.

In practice, I think it'd have the same problem as the core map data - surprisingly good data in places with a lot of adopters, and nothing at all in places without.

That said, though, the traffic data is pretty secondary - a good, open routing engine would be lovely to have, and will slowly become more relevant as the map expand and fills out.