OSMUS State of Charge - June 8, 2025

GA_Kevin · June 8, 2025, 3:59pm

State of Charge - June 8th, 2025

For the week of June 1^st to June 7^th the Alternative Fuel Data Center has posted 42 new charging stations in the United States! All of which have been uploaded to OSM. To subscribe to these changes in OSM and to see an archive of .csv and .geojson files please add the RSS feed to your favorite reader. All links and files are also centrally located on the OSM Wiki as the United States AFDC Manual Sync Project.

Insights from this week

During the conflation step with existing OSM data, there was one item(s) to conflate, which was a station I had imported mid-week during some unrelated additions. A neat new station is the bp pulse gigahub in California, featuring 8 NACS and 4 CCS connectors to those near San Francisco airport. I have included a rendering of a gigahub as the station is not on more commerical applications like PlugShare yet to share photos:

Compared to last week’s addition of 24 station, this week’s addition of 42 is a welcome uptick (Memorial Day likely slowed progress last week).
I have yet to confirm anywhere else (but please feel free to survey!) but it seems some ChargePoint stations have started putting native NACS connectors in their new stations. This is a welcome addition as previously only Tesla and Alpitronic dispensers had native NACS in the US. As this is now the new standard (even bearing our continent name - North America Charging Standard) I suspect these will start to show quite the uptick as older CHAdeMO ports are replaced with NACS and CCS.

New in the Charging Station OSM world

Progress on the EV station cleanup has slowed as my attention has focused more to imports than cleanup. So far the following states have been updated:

Georgia
South Carolina
Florida

The site / database supercharege.info has agreed to let OSM users use their data and I am coordinating an import of their data on their discourse: link to the discussion. If all goes well we would be getting much more up-to-date information on Tesla superchargers in the US and they would benefit from OSM data as well on their site. To facilitate this, I have “Any Tag You Like” created ref:supercharge_info=* to have a common field between our databases. It is still early days but I will be updating the Supercharge.info_Import page on my Codeberg with any files / scripts I use. So far I did a test import of the state of Georgia and seemed to go well. Both I and “Rovastar” on the Supercharge.info side have gone through it and are discussing ways to make the larger import better. I will be creating some OSM wiki pages this week on discussions, proposed imports, etc. to be OSM-compliant.

I am hopeful this goes smoothly and we can reach out to a few more sources to do the same on a non-Tesla import. Specifically, I have been reading through the discussions with OpenChargeMap (we use ref:ocm=* already in OSM to link the database) and will hopefully reach out to see if their CC 4.0 license can be imported into OSM or what parts can. They are essentially the OSS equivalent of PlugShare in the US so it is much more crowd-sourced data which is sometimes great but I imagine will require a bit more of a fine tooth comb to go through.

A Special Thanks

A very special thanks is in order to @Rovastar from Supercharge.info this week for their willingness to have OSM use their data!

Rovastar · June 8, 2025, 4:12pm

I’m here too. Just don’t post much on OSM boards nowadays.

Edit: 2007 I joined that makes me feel old now…

GA_Kevin · June 8, 2025, 4:13pm

Updated the “special thanks” section to tag you! Thanks!

GA_Kevin · June 8, 2025, 4:36pm

I was 10 when you joined if that saids anything! OSM has been around for as long as I’ve been able to use a computer, but I only just found it December 2024

Rovastar · June 9, 2025, 6:05pm

That makes it worse! You kid.

I must say you have peaked my interest in doing charging stations in OSM.

I gave up a few years ago because the standard/agreement was so bad but the wiki and general consensus has improved a lot now and I think the sockets for tesla stuff is fixable.

I’m looking to do an overhaul of the Name Suggestion Index stuff to get that up to speed and I’ll chip on the wiki to get things improved.

Regarding these AFDB changes in general. It would be nice if you could match up some of the data with the NSI. Rivian Adventure Network, etc.
I know some aren’t there yet. BP pulse is an obvious omission in the US,

It can be tricky with operator and brand tags too for the EVGO ones that partner with pilot/flying J so not sure what the brand /operator is there and I’m not sure at all what you should do with Chargepoint as they are often branded differently. EA also cobrands a lot.

This is most an American issue as Europe doesn’t have many like this and I can’t think of many case in the rest of the world but the US started the blurring of the lines of true CPOs with I’ll call them “charging networks”. Tesla are doing this too with their selling superchargers to others and they can brand them but be a charging network and with Tesla as the traditional CPO. I think this trend will continue worldwide.

It would easier to just go with what the AFDB but I’m not sure that would be correct - although struggling to concrete formula for optimum solutions. I would be interested in your thoughts, Obviously imports are good and that is your goal here but I want a robust framework for what we should call all of these in the future for the whole of OSM.

Also you use the name tag as the same as the brand/operator. That goes against the wiki (which is questionable as it the signpost.) but maybe the wiki needs changing.

Lumikeiju · June 9, 2025, 6:08pm

And for US-WA: I added a recently-opened new station here and removed one that no longer exists here.

For that first one, I would appreciate your review and fixup, since this is a topic I don’t know much about!

There’s Mapillary imagery that I took, if that’s helpful: linky

GA_Kevin · June 9, 2025, 7:50pm

@Lumikeiju - That looks great! Only thing I would add (and it’s completely up to you and the level of detail you want) is the man_made=charge_point nodes. These are the physical dispensers, and in Tesla’s case 1 dispenser = 1 capacity. According to supercharge.info, these do not have magic docks but is a Tesla partner site so it would be:

man_made=charge_point
brand=Tesla
brand:wikidata=Q478214
socket:nacs=1
socket:nacs:output=350
capacity=1
access=yes

Same with the overall station if you wanted to add:

socket:nacs=12
access=yes
capacity=12

Thanks for finding it! It may take me some time to work my way over to the west coast with my AFDC imports and such.

Lumikeiju · June 9, 2025, 7:52pm

Thanks for the info! It’s not something I’m personally interested in mapping at that level of detail, but I really appreciate the details and the work you’re doing!

GA_Kevin · June 9, 2025, 8:12pm

Mission accomplished!

Perhaps @bhousel may be good to coordinate with that on. He is involved (maintainer?) of the NSI, as well as a Tesla owner himself so we’ve had these discussions too. I tried to add IONNA but got pushback because it is too new, so I’ve placed my efforts elsewhere, but I’m sure the NSI folks would welcome a pull request!

long drag on cigarette… you’ve stumbled upon one of my imperfections! As this is a manual process right now (mainly done in LibreCalc after a minor python script to filter the total database) It’s mostly a “what Kevin has heard them called before.” Since I have only done this for a few weeks now, you’ll find week to week is slightly different as I settle into a workflow. Some networks I do shorten, for instance AFDC has ChargePoint as CHARGEPOINT NETWORK. I find the former to be more widely used and OSM-compatible so I change it. Certainly up for suggestions on standardization on that. Might be worth a wiki page to show conversions of more than column names for things like that (and wikidata vlaues so I don’t need to search to page 3 of wikidata each week to find the Q number of FLO).

I love this particular challenge. It is technically GM Energy, at a Pilot/Flying J, part of the EVgo Xtended network. Who is the CPO? I don’t know. I know that I put brand=GM Energy and network=EVgo. Is PFJ an operator? That’s a lot to ask a casual mapper to contemplate. Especially if it is GM now that they are pretty heavy into IONNA while still propping up GM Energy stations.

Sometimes they are the brand but many times they are wrapped and are the operator (like utility stations near me). Sometimes they are just one of many networks at a station (IONNA can be paid for via ChargePoint app)(Mercedes-Benz uses ChargePoint branding on their stations - at least they did, I havent checked one of their new Alpitronic stations), and sometimes they are just the manufacturer of a charge point.

It’s a bit difficult because EV infrastructure typically uses “Charge Point Operator” (CPO) to refer to the operator of a station, that often times includes connecting to their network and using their charge management systems. But to a user of EV chargers, they typically care about brand (so they can filter based on that), network (so they can make sure they can pay how they like), socket so they can make sure they are physically able to charge.

Stations rarely have a name. And when they do, it’s much more of a “type” or “model” of station (unfortunately doen’t fit the OSM model definition) such as Tesla Supercharge vs Destination Charger or IONNA’s Rechargery, Rechargery Relay, and Rechargery Beacons.

I’m all for wiki changes, and would actually think it is easier to create a “United States Charging Station” guide / page where we put all this when we compile it. We could then link to that page from the main amenity=charging_station and man_made=charge_point pages.