OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

Another problem with Waze, by the way, is that the algorithm is designed to route you away from a busy intersection or a congested street without regard to whether or not going out of your way will take more time than just slogging through the street/intersection. Waze also likes to do stupid things like insisting you make a left onto a six-lane divided highway without a light.

And their pathing is just bad: it insists on cutting through a gated community to get to my place, something that's physically impossible. And even worse, the entrances to that gated community and my townhouse complex are on different arterials. It also doesn't recognize the entrance to my townhouse complex as a valid entrance too (if you try to enter via the entrance, Waze will shriek at you to turn around, get back on the arterial, and find the gated community). I've also seen it straight-up get lost before when trying to go to one bar that's near my office.

Because of this, I long ago decided that whenever I request a Lyft, and I'm going either to or from home, I will call the driver and say "My name is Amy, I requested a ride. I'm calling to confirm that you are not using Waze.", and I will hang up and cancel if they say they're using Waze, if they don't speak enough English to understand the question (I live in a pretty diverse city, so this is common), or if they demand why I'm asking and then start angrily grilling me about every detail related to my destination.

And, yes, the third scenario is sadly common. I have never seen people get angry in real life like Waze partisans do except where actual religion is involved... imagine the worst kinds of vim/emacs warriors, Linux/Mac/Windows fanboys, PlayStation/Xbox/Nintendo/PC zealots, iPhone/Android partisans, etc., except in real life instead of on the Internet. It's actually why I started calling ahead: I used to just wait for the driver to get here, get in the car, and then as soon as they start the navigation and Waze comes up, I would calmly say "please don't use Waze, it can't get to where I'm going". The reaction was, more often than not, angry and aggressive. They treat "Waze can't get to where I'm going" as an attack on their lifestyle. After dealing with abusive drivers who will call me a liar to my face, screaming "that's the only thing I have!" at the top of their lungs, getting violent (I had one lady who punched her steering wheel while screaming the aforementioned), and sometimes getting straight-up kicking me out of the car (my response is always "Gladly!"), I've learned to call ahead and filter them out, as I have no desire to come within 10 feet of nasty, aggressive religious warriors. Oh, sure there have been plenty of Waze users who will let me navigate them manually (I can navigate from my office to my home in my sleep) or who will let me open Google Maps on my own phone and listen to the voice nav from there, but the number of angry fanboys and fangirls with no emotional maturity means that I'm not willing to risk it.

And it's because of the aggressive religious warriors who I'm afraid to share a vehicle with, and to a smaller degree because Waze's pathing sucks in general, I've started to call ahead to make sure they're not using Waze even when I'm not going to or from my house.

> Everyone was super keen to make OSM in to a web of committees, and this is one root of the problem from an organizational point of view.

Oh come come Steve, you know better than me that's not true. There is one genuine committee in OSM (OSMF board, which does nothing, which is probably a good thing given how well their attempts to do something work out) and three things that are nominally committees but in reality just a small number of self-motivated volunteers doing thankless grunt work (Licensing Working Group, Data Working Group, State of the Map [conference] Working Group).

OSM is about the least hierarchical, least committee-fied project there is. Compare to Wikimedia - or, you know, any form of government - if you want to see what committees are really like.

> I can't imagine trying to explain how to use OSM to my mom

But why would your mum have heard of OSM and be trying to download it in the first place?

She might well have heard of a third-party app - in certain countries and communities OSM-based apps are massive and have significant brand recognition - and download that. Or she might be using a name brand like Apple or Facebook or Garmin or whoever, all of whom use OSM under the hood.

OSM isn't a consumer-facing brand and doesn't aim to be.

> The API returns only nodes entirely within an area, rather than everything intersecting a given area.

The osm.org API is meant for editing. It's not a map rendering and querying API. There are lots of alternatives for that.

> There was free building data available for areas I was interested in, but I was told to copy them by hand.

OSM is open to imported data. It just has to be done carefully because "with great power comes great responsibility" - add millions of items to the OSM database and you can royally screw it up (there is an argument to say that most of OSM's problems in the US stem from this). But there's a well documented imports process and lots of people with experience in importing buildings to help you through it.

I use Galileo, but it's the only one I've used on Android or iOS so I'm not sure how good it is but it works for me.