And there’s a reason: First of all, it’s illegal. And they can be outdated, contain false information – some maps contain even ‘copyright easter eggs’ to make it possible to prove the map has been copied.

Aarne Arvosen kuja

OSM vs Google

There’s this finnish guy who was mapping in Järvenpää, a town some 40 km north from Helsinki. He finds a street that had a sign ‘Aarne Arvosen kuja’ (Aarne Arvonen’s alley or so..). Takes a photo, goes home and inputs the data to OpenStreetMap. Then he compares the newly generated OSM map to Google maps and finds that the name of the steet doesn’t match on the maps: the almighty Google called it ‘Hiskinkatu’. Some further surfing pointed out that both Karttapaikka (of National Land Survey of Finland) and the map the City of Järvenpää has on their web page both have the same name, Hiskinkatu.

Openstreetmap

(C) Google

(C) Karttapaikka

(C) Järvenpään kaupunki

He found this article in a local newspaper mentioning the street. Almost 10 years ago someone suggested that the street would be named after the oldest citizen of Järvenpää, 110 years old Aarne. And now in June 2008 the proposal was finally accepted.

So OpenStreetMap as a freely editable map can react to changes like this very fast: within hours (well, it can take up to week to re-render the map) the changes can be seen on the map. Having many eyes around to check the validity of the information and seeing and hearing about the changes should help fixing false or old information quickly. If they some day start paving a road on your way to work you can mark it paved the very same day. Of course this is not always the case but the concept of OpenStreetMap makes this possible. The more contributors the better the correctness and more up-to-date the map is. No-one gets paid, people do it to get a good, free, flexible map.

How about commercial maps? They don’t update constantly so they contain old data, as seen in the example above. Then, on the other hand, there are stories of roads or bridges that actually don’t exist yet but they have already been added in the maps because otherwise the map would be outdated right after the release. To produce quality maps you need a lot of money. To have them up-to-date you need a lot more money. And for this reason they want to make other people pay to use the maps.

And hey – don’t trust your GPS navigator too much, it can be fatal – I was told about a lady who was taken by the navigator to an unfinished bridge falling down in her expensive Mercedes.

New York car accidents caused by GPS devices
Bus driver chooses GPS over gigantic warning sign, plows into overpass

ps. got the nice image viewer finally working :)

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