I have a front-facing dashcam in my car. It records videos when I drive. Would this be useful for others? The videos are not stamped with GPS coordinates but I don't go off road or anything so you can usually tell the name of the street or highway I am on just by the street signs. Are these dash cam videos worth saving?

Edit: this is in the US

I contribute street images to Mapillary and Google Street View. Mostly in nature /trails where the cars don't reach, with my goal of making it easier for people to plan their journeys and get outside. I've never quite understood how to contribute to Panoramax, though?

No shared instance for uploading images for Norway as I see it, and feels weird having to set up my own federated instance if all I want to do is offload all my pictures for others to use? I know the one on the page you linked says "OSM World wide", but reading at the wiki https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Panoramax it says not to use it for things outside france, and I also can't understand how I contribute to MapComplete.

(here's the tooling I've built for myself btw https://github.com/Matsemann/matsemanns-streetview-tools/ )

cartes.app looks sharp!

Organic Maps or OSM-based maps in general are great, but for routing nothing can replace Google Maps (or Waze) here yet, because they are the only ones with actual, near real-time traffic data.

And here in Belgium, your 100 km trip could take anywhere between 50 minutes and 2 hours depending on whether there's traffic in the Kennedytunnel or an accident in Nazareth. It's crucial for me to check traffic before I leave, so if there's a one-hour traffic jam I can just do whatever else for an hour before leaving.

And I haven't found a way to check that without Google Maps yet. But I use OsmAnd if I'm not taking the highway.

I’m surprised they can’t flag these misclassified roads by tracking traffic flow through them. A bad road should exhibit little traffic (or even more reroutes).

Even in Europe Google Maps can be surprisingly bad. For example, in Portugal, their routing algorithm thought you could drive across the top of this dam. But when you get there, you absolutely cannot: https://maps.app.goo.gl/jBRNbeqZiY9cu8eL9 If you zoom out, you'll see it's quite a long detour to backtrack.

(I reported this mistake, and it seems to be corrected now)

This is common in South Asia. Even cities like Chennai have this happen. I was driving down a road that became narrower and narrower until I had to back up or end up like a character in a Junji Ito manga.

To be fair, I find modern Google maps absolutely perplexing as well, the user experience has really degraded as ads and other functionality has been shoved in on top of what I want - a map to get to where I'm going.

Instead it's so damn slow as to be hard to get anything done while on the go, even with maps downloaded, modern Android phone, etc.

It really, really needs a simplification refresh.

I just learned from this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HSYTIEXa5w that google localizes it's driving directions to be landmark-based in certain countries. In this video it mentions India specifically.

Why would Grab need to "convert professional drivers to real maps"? According to the article, it's already solving for all the unique problems by building out their own map.

Your reads to me like you expect that if someone comes to you and gives you GPS coordinates, you should be able to know where that is because you have a GPS in your pocket. No, you'd need to put the GPS coordinates into something and have it translated to something that made sense for you, like into Google Maps. Same goes for Thais, even if it's a PITA for you.

Unique problems require unique solutions, and I think your definition of a map is probably too closed-minded. Imagine trying to take a real map and deliver something here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQyVMy6_n1k

> I feel like there was some underlying sociological issue there where Thais thought of maps in terms only really of landmarks

This is such an interesting comment, I'm curious of your age. I grew up and learned to drive before smart phones existed and landmark based directions were extremely common. Directions like this were expected, moreso than street name based directions. "Take a left at the 3rd light after the freeway, then a right after 7-11, and it is the 5th house on the left with the blue door and red Truck in the driveway".

What is interesting is that these drivers are still using this older method.

I've seen both delivery drivers (on motorcycles) and Grab taxies use GPS navigation in Thailand. Regular taxi drivers might have an ego thing or something. Or maybe they can't read the latin script.

Grab is basically Uber + Ubereats in south-east Asia

(Quite literally - Uber sold off their SEA operations to Grab in exchange for a stake in Grab, when Uber exited the SEA market)

Yes. And they accept cryptocurrency natively (without using gift cards), extremely practical for believers in the space.

Uber also owns a significant share of Grab.

Its main services include ride-hailing, food delivery, payment and digital bank and more...

Blinkit in India does 10 minute deliveries. It’s pretty mind blowing.

Is this comment on the wrong article?

Why would you like to see these things? It seems undesirable to return results in a language the querier does not understand.

1 and 3 are done. (2) cannot be done practically by any dominant search engine because, no joke, the spam site owners get mad.