What are your favorite examples of OpenStreetMap use in government?

General talk
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I’m collecting good examples of OSM in current use by governments (national or state or city). I know about OpenStreetMap for Government - OpenStreetMap Wiki and there are good examples there, but also expect there’s a few that are out of date, and many that are missing. I’m not trying to be exhaustive, but get a dozen cases from around the world that are inspiring.

What are your favorite examples of OpenStreetMap use in government?

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The one I was personally involved in 15 years ago. It’s used by thousands of people daily still!

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OpenStreetMap building data was used to supplement official building data as at that time official data was updated at 5 year intervals (for given area). And it was missing illegally built residential buildings.

At that time firefighters were also using OpenStreetMap data in Poland as official road and building data had hilariously high fees (at that time, data was released openly since then) AND roads mismatched at internal borders AND each unit of firefighters would need to pay license fees for data separately, rather than firefighters buying license once. So company preparing system for them used OpenStreetMap data instea.

I know this as in 2018 company that was preparing flood preparation plans in Poland (for Silesia or its part) shared on OpenStreetMap conference in Poznań.

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Just reminded me I take this for granted here. Rural EMS and fire in eastern Oklahoma make extensive use of OSM because the official county and state maps don’t include land access roads, driveways and buildings basically at all, whereas OSM often does (and is often the only map approaching accuracy). In too many cases, the official maps are decades out of date; one nearby county’s map is missing Keystone Lake and has the City of Mannford at its old location which is now underwater in Keystone Lake, for example.

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This directory my municipality has on its website, though it has loads of businesses that vanished a long time ago, like this small computer store (so blindly relying on it to update OSM POIs is not an option)

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In Berlin, we have been working over the past two or three years to raise awareness of OSM among the administration, which has resulted in a number of collaborations and data projects. In addition to volunteer activities, there are now also two larger organized mapping projects. The projects include in particular:

  • Mapping and development of a street parking register based on OSM that can be continuously maintained in the future (citywide, organized editing in cooperation with the city administration)
  • In one district, we have already created such a street parking register on a voluntary basis and derived a data set from it, which (correctly attributed ;) can be found in the local geodata portal
  • Recording detailed bike path attributes in the main bike network to obtain structured data on the condition of the bike traffic network and support bike traffic planning (citywide, organized editing in cooperation with the public agency for bike traffic planning)
  • On local level, there is good communication between some local authorities/staff members and the OSM community (individual mappers) in some neighborhoods. We are trying to establish a system whereby the authorities can notify us as a community of structural changes so that we can map them systematically. From time to time, we get some data, plans, Excel spreadsheets… on various topics to help us with mapping. Some government employees actively use OSM data for planning purposes—for example, an employee recently tried to derive possible locations for green arrows for bicycle traffic from OSM data. Our local Straßenraumkarte has already been used by the administration for communication purposes, e.g., in participation events.
  • Pedestrian traffic planning is likely to have potential in the future, where we have a treasure trove in OSM that has not yet been exploited, e.g., with regard to accessibility, school route safety, etc.
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A while back I started User:Tordans/OSM-Verwaltung-Beispiele - OpenStreetMap Wiki to collect examples and some day make this into a proper overview…

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The German national mapping agency ([BKG](https://www.bkg.bund.de/)) has a product called [TopPlusOpen]( TopPlusOpen Webkarten ) which combines official data for Germany with OSM data everywhere else into a seemless map. A similar product is at basemap.de, created by the AdV which is the union of all the 16 state mapping agencies in Germany.

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