Your new post is loading...
The million-plus amateur cartographers who volunteer their time to plot roads, streets, and even shrubbery for Open Street Map were busier than ever this year. The beautiful map above, created by MapBox, shows how the database has grown since its inception in 2004. Hot pink areas are newly mapped, blue and green areas are older. (scroll down a screen length or two for the zoomable version within Mapbox's annual report). OSM's database of more than 21 million miles of roads and 78 million buildings, keeps finding new uses, such as helping first responders to disasters like this year's typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.
This open map project has finally gotten to the point where it seems generally useful for larger regional studies of coastal zones/road infrastructure.
It is great having both the formal google earth/apple maps datasets AND these more open-source datasets.