Open Street Maps (OSM) Updates
Answered
Hi,
How often does Hammerhead do OSM updates?
I recently went on a long gravel ride, made the mistake of leaving my reading glasses at home and ended up fighting with my Karoo most of the way because I couldn't see the UI or the map properly and because my Karoo was constantly re-routing...
My Karoo was constantly re-routing because the OSM maps for gravel roads in my area (NW Oregon) are awful, with completely fictional roads, like the "connector" that goes straight off the side of a mountain (see photo),
and places where the actual roads are hundreds of feet from where they should be. To make things worse, most of the roads are classified as "unmaintained/track" which, drawn as a dashed gray line on the white Karoo background (see photo), is difficult to see.
When I got home, I jumped onto Open Street Maps and spent the next 6 hours fixing the map from my ride: deleting and adding roads, adding and moving points to line up with aerial images and GPS data... (It's so cool that we can actually do this!)
So, now that I've fixed the map, how long do I have to wait before Hammerhead updates "Oregon"??? And, how often does Hammerhead update the downloadable maps?
-Donald
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As far as I can remember, there have been 2–3 map updates in the past 12 months. I’d say this is frequent enough for offline maps, having to download 10+ GB of maps, say, monthly (which is what I do with OSMand+, though I only update the regions I actually plan to be in, as needed) does not seem to make that much of a difference, especially in terms of temporary road features like closures. Case in point: over here OSM data is generally quite reliable (except for altitude data...), but I rode today past a section of fairly busy bike path that has been closed due to building construction next to it for over a year, and it still appears on OSM as though it was open.
Obviously one way to get around this is to plan your routes on a service that uses the most recent OSM data and just use those routes as such (afaik the route line does not care if there is a road or a path underneath or not). I suppose you now have a bunch of good test cases to see how responsive the different services are...
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Thanks for the reply!
It works to generate the route line in another app as long as the route line is accurate. I use Strava because the maps are a little better than OSM around here. But if the route line is not accurate you can get in trouble because Karoo will automatically re-route you using it's own maps, which are pretty unreliable in these woods.
Are the map packages saved in standard format? I wonder if we could generate our own...
Regarding map updates, it would be helpful to have a date/history log for the downloads.
I'll have to try OSMand+ -- I use Locus Pro for Android.
-Donald
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Great information .
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Suggesting that we use some other tool for planning routes is not an acceptable work-around for not keeping the underlying maps current. As pointed out by others, we bought into the K2 concept, which includes route planning an management. We need current maps to do that. The device's map also needs it for reroutes and accurate route information.
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