Happy birthday, OpenStreetMap!

Areas can have bad routing for a variety of reasons: missing roads, wrong one-way streets, roads that aren’t connected and so on.

Using billions of GPS traces, MapMetrics can assess how close or far drivers are from the route that the OSM engine suggests. When MapMetrics identifies large deviations, where drivers have strayed far from the route suggested in OSM, MapMetrics highlights those map areas with a red-to-green color scale.

MapMetrics allows you to find where the map may have these issues over very large areas and enables the community to focus on the hotspots. As you can see above it’s a work in progress: MapMetrics flags, in red, Colorado ski areas and the Denver Airport. Neither of these are bad per se, but ski run and taxiway routing isn’t a thing yet! Over time, MapMetrics will filter these out to focus on just the roads.

As we zoom in, we can see some red tiles indicating map routing issues. By clicking to edit in iD, which takes you to OpenStreetMap, we immediately see what the problem is:

In this example, there’s a missing OSM highway:track that continues north on the satellite image, but doesn’t appear on the map. With MapMetrics anyone can quickly fix it by editing the problem area.

MapMetrics allows a very short feedback loop between finding issues in maps and correcting them using iD. We can’t wait to see what you do with it!