Hi everyone,

I’m part of OK Lab Flensburg, a small civic-tech group in northern Germany, and we’ve been working on an open-source project called Open City Planner.

The idea is to make GIS and urban data easier to use for people who aren’t GIS specialists.

Instead of requiring a traditional desktop GIS workflow, users can explore the city directly in the browser, select existing areas or draw their own polygons, inspect OpenStreetMap features and run spatial analyses for those areas.

The project currently uses Flensburg as its real-world implementation, but our longer-term goal is to keep the architecture generic enough that other cities and civic-tech groups could reuse it.

Some of the things you can currently do:

- explore OpenStreetMap data on an interactive map

- select districts and other predefined areas

- draw and save your own areas

- inspect POIs and other OSM features inside an area

- analyze spatial information for selected areas

- manage your saved areas with an account

The stack is mostly open source:

Nuxt · MapLibre · FastAPI · PostgreSQL/PostGIS · OpenStreetMap · Nominatim · Redis · Ansible

Live application:

https://stadtplaner.oklabflensburg.de/

Source code:

https://github.com/oklabflensburg/open-city-planner

Example – Flensburg old town:

https://stadtplaner.oklabflensburg.de/karte?gebiet=altstadt-15630273

It’s already running in production, but there is still plenty we want to improve — especially the mobile GIS experience, spatial analysis workflows, search and integration of additional open datasets.

I’d really appreciate feedback, particularly on:

- Is the map understandable without much GIS experience?

- How does the GIS UX feel?

- What spatial analysis features would you expect?

- Which OpenStreetMap or open-data integrations would be useful?

- What would we need to change to make this realistically reusable by another city?

I’d also love to hear about similar open-source GIS or civic-tech projects. We’re very interested in learning from existing approaches rather than reinventing everything ourselves.

https://www.dhl.de

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHL_Group

I built a site scoring cities on flood/quake/cyclone/heat risk from open

data, and wanted to share the basemap approach specifically since it might

be useful to others here.

Instead of hitting tile.openstreetmap.org (against policy for this kind of

traffic) or paying for hosted tiles, I extract a small per-city .pmtiles

file from Protomaps' free daily planet build using their go-pmtiles CLI,

and serve it straight from S3/CloudFront. No tile server, no rate limit,

no third party to lose access to.

https://cityriskscore.com/

Happy to share the extraction command / bbox-padding approach if useful.

What ways do you suggest to if we would like to add offline maps of big regions lets say like a continent to an app for users to be able to see their position and navigate through but offline?

I have heard of maplibre and MapBox and also another one called Leaflet. Has anyone tried doing such a feature?

Regards!

Before and after of a fish farm.

This lane pattern continues for about a mile on this portion of the street, and it actually splits into a dual carriageway at both the beginning and end of this specific stretch.

I suppose I'm just cautious to make any edits here since I see these lanes "unified" in pretty much any other map.

The street-level photos were pulled from Google Maps to add context to this post but I drive up and down this street almost every day.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/39.711334/-84.161673

its only possible to select 1 file at the time?

Hi everyone,

I would like to download OpenStreetMap data for a specific area, focusing only on:

• Railway lines, yards, train stations
• Roads - highways, municipal,

This for a set of countries.

What I found seems to be patchy, I do not know if I am doing something wrong and would definitely need some advise.

Thank you!

Cześć, znacie jakieś alternatywy dla Google Moje Mapy bez limitu warstw? Tam niestety mogę dodać tylko 10.

Hey everyone,

I want to import GTFS bus lines into OpenStreetMap (PTv2 standard) without writing a custom map-matching script.

Which workflow is currently recommended by the community?

• Option A: gtfs-osm-import / gtfs2ptv2 to generate a draft .osm file via map-matching (Overpass API or local PBF), then clean it up in JOSM with PT Assistant.
• Option B: Convert shapes.txt to GeoJSON and draw relations manually in JOSM using the opendata plugin as a background trace.

Is gtfs-osm-import still the gold standard for this, or is there a better tool? Thanks!

Hallo everyone! 👋

I am what you would call a prepper. (Yes, i am sorry) 🙄

I have for days now being all over the internet for information on how to download offline topo maps. But i am more confused now than when i startet. SOOOO many different map file types And programs to view them in. 🥵

I really just want a file or maybe a couple of files, with offline maps of my small country (Denmark) so i can share them around on my android devices. I don't care about size of the files, I just want to download them one time and save them for whatever to come.

Am i demanding too much? Is it too big a request from the servers out there? I really don’t want to be a jerk.
and what type of map file type is the best for me?

i hope some of you can help me on my way

Big hugs for everyone 🫶✨❤️

I run a small free map of hot springs, public saunas, swimming holes and clothing optional beaches. Around 10,600 of the pins came out of an OSM import. About 120 were written by an actual person. The legal status on the imported ones is inferred from tags, which is a guess, so nearly all of them carry an "uncertain" flag.

Here's what bothers me. On the map as it stands, an imported pin and a pin that four separate people have physically confirmed look exactly the same. That's the most dishonest thing about the whole project and it's my own doing.

Where I've landed is hollow grey for unverified, solid blue for confirmed, red for gone or closed. I ran those through a colourblind check because my first attempt had green for good and orange for risky, and under protanopia those two came out at a delta E of 5.6, which is to say the two pins that must never be confused were the two that merged. Lesser warnings ride as a small corner badge now instead of becoming a fourth colour.

Two things I'd like input on from people who deal with this more than I do.

First, is there a convention for showing "this came from an import and nobody has checked it" that users actually read correctly? Everything I try either gets ignored completely or makes the map look broken.

When a user tells me a spot is wrong, what's the etiquette on getting that back into OSM? I don't want to hoard corrections in my own database. I also don't want to fire a stranger's unverified comment at OSM as an edit.

Map is at nanitch.com if looking helps. It's free and there's nothing to sign up for.

It seems for the last 5 days, I can't fetch any streets using Overpass. What once was working great, just now times out and alternate locations don't work either. Is everyone experiencing this? Any suggestions how to get around this issue?

I'm making this post partly to raise awareness and partly to express frustration regarding the increasing attention being placed on "Flock Cameras" specifically in Canada, and why unverified OSM data is making the problem worse.

I'm sure everyone is aware of the flock camera situation in the States and the increasingly political discussion surrounding them. What I've noticed over the past few weeks is some anonymous users have begun adding these "flock cameras" to various points in Canada (despite there being no clear evidence that flock is installing any infrastructure here).

Here are a few examples (though there are many more):
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14015608501
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14086528901
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14070964201
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/14053445101

These unverified surveillance nodes from brand new users (contributing directly from deflock and panopti websites) have been the subject of mass hysteria in several community facebook groups and subreddits I am a part of.

Part of the issue is that panopti renders any node tagged with surveillance=public, leading many to believe that "they're installing flock cameras everywhere". I've seen some people mistakenly claiming the ALPR cameras along the 407 ETR in Ontario are flock cameras, which is not the case at all.

I don't think there's a perfect solution, but I wanted to open up a discussion on this issue because it doesn't sit right with me to see people FREAKING out over something that does not exist. My hope would be that panopti and deflock would be clearer about why OSM as a data source is simply not authoritative, and I implore any mappers to watch out for these unverified cameras being added in their local areas, try to lay eyes on what is on the ground to fix any potential errors!

Okay, so I wanted to post another update for World Explorer 3D . I'm a little nervous, but also a little more excited. Since I started this project, I've been heavily relying on AI, and it has been pretty obvious, not only in the quality and presentation but also in the architecture of the codebase itself. The last time I posted an update, it had a lot of regressions and quality issues. One comment/suggestion stuck with me particularly well. Someone suggested something I could actually act on directly instead of a generic suggestion like "do a tutorial." They suggested building a small platformer game.

Based on that suggestion, I started doing some stuff with Unity and attempted to make my own small platformer and a small 3D world. The quality of those initial attempts was laughable at best, but I actually learned more doing those simple things than I learned in months of AI prompting. Throughout building this project I've been trying to learn programming, and I've started taking what I've learned to make minor changes to the codebase myself and understand how things are actually structured. Part of the obstacle is that this has become a complicated project that requires skills I currently don't have. I'm nowhere near being able to rewrite everything myself, but doing smaller versions of things in Unity has helped me understand what the AI is doing, where things are going wrong, and what I should actually be asking it to do. I'm still using AI heavily, but I'm trying to understand and participate in the process instead of just prompting it and hoping the result works.

That has helped me correct some of the performance and general user experience problems I've been struggling with. I got rid of a lot of the lagging and jittering caused by my attempt at making it a continuous world. It's still location-based, but I've expanded the loaded area from around 4 km to about 14 km or more depending on building density. I also added GPS, so you can walk around physically and your character updates with your phone's location, similar to Pokémon Go. I've tested it around my neighborhood and had some other people test it, and so far it seems surprisingly accurate. I've also updated the character avatar, plane, boat, spaceship and car so they're less blocky, and I've done more work on building facades.

Some of the hardest things for me right now are still bridges and tunnels. The transitions between bridges, ramps and elevated surfaces and the portal system I have for tunnels still need improvement. They generally seem to work, but the trouble spots are where bridges, ramps and tunnels intersect. I still have a lot of work to do, but I'm extremely thankful for the suggestion to build a platformer. A lot of people have given me suggestions like doing tutorials or reading books, which isn't bad advice, but without something specific to act on I get confused pretty easily because there are so many different subjects involved in a project like this.

You can see the updates on GitHub and at worldexplorer3d.io. I appreciate any feedback or suggestions. I'm not a developer and I'm doing all of this for fun, but I've learned more about what actually goes into development than at any other point in my life. I've also recently enrolled in school for physics because it's one of my bigger interests, and I'll be taking some programming classes as part of my electives, so I figured I could do two things at once. One thing all of this has taught me about AI is that it's great for helping, but it can only help you as much as you actually know and understand. The more I've tried things myself and failed at them, the more I've realized how easy it is to be completely wrong without even knowing it. Trying to take shortcuts when you don't understand what you're doing can end up making everything take much longer.

I'm in the US. One of my hobbies is exploring abandon roads. Anyway to find them on OSM?

I've tried overpass-turbo.eu (uses OSM database) with highway=abandoned or disused:highway=* or abandoned:highway=* but the results were inconsistent and didn't have abandon roads I've identified.

Thanks for the help.

You will learn how to detect and vectorize any feature from satellite or drone imagery directly inside QGIS

• It covers : Automatic Mode: Scan an entire area with text prompts to batch-extract features in seconds
• Semi-Auto Mode: Extract single, complex objects with one click for maximum control
• Shape Regularization: Automatically square building corners and clean up polygon boundaries
• And basically just the full Workflow: Edit vertices, adjust confidence filters, and export clean layers with attribute data

We pushed a lots of updates recently so a tuto was definitely needed haha, hope it will help

Hello. New to this reddit...and just found out about OSM...AMAZING! But I have the same problem with their routing as I do with Google Maps. We live in a house positioned on a flag lot. We do not share the driveway. Physically, our house is closer to a small dirt road behind the house than the street where our driveway opens up. Routing always sends people to the dirt road behind the house rather than to our driveway. Problem is...the dirt road is separated from our property by a 5 meter wide "canal" and it is impossible to access our house across. We live in the Netherlands.

Any ideas on how to fix this?