- Many users put their hometowns so that they're visible when you zoom out really far (you see the suburbs of Salt Lake City & L.A. before you see SLC & L.A.)
- There seems to be 80 airports in every county (I've never heard of most of the ones around my area)
- It's incomplete in many places
- It doesn't even give you directions
I'm sorry, but I just don't trust OpenStreetMaps over Google Maps. I'm sure there aren't many inaccuracies, but it's not worth taking the chance when I'm traveling in an unfamiliar area.
> It's highway markers look like gel capsules
There's a long-running bug in Mapnik (the rendering engine for the tiles) that, when completed, will allow for SVG highway markers.
It doesn't really matter that they'll be fixed in the future... What matter's is that's how they look now
> Many users put their hometowns so that they're visible when you zoom out really far
Can you give more examples of this? More than likely it's due to problems with the import of TIGER data a couple years ago. It should have been fixed
Both Warren and Detroit are 'cities' in the US, so both are tagged "place=city", i.e. both at the same level. The map rendered can't draw both, so it can't decide which to show, so it picks one. It's hard to come up with a good way to rank the hierachies of cities.
> - Many users put their hometowns so that they're visible when you zoom out really far (you see the suburbs of Salt Lake City & L.A. before you see SLC & L.A.)
The data for USA was imported from the US government, the TIGER data. One problem with rendering a map is the importance of cities. Both (say) San Francisco and San Jose are close to each other, and you only have room to show one. Which do you show? The largest population? Larger GDP? Larger cultural influence (how do you measure that?), etc. It's a 'hard problem'.
> - It's incomplete in many places
Yes, it's a work in progress, made by voluneteers. However it has come so far in a few years.
> - It doesn't even give you directions
There are other OSM-based services that give directions. One I used is CloudMade (http://maps.cloudmade.com/). Some of the people who started OSM founded CloudMade.
It's worth remembering that OSM in the US is the poor cousin compared with the rest of the world. You should check out London, Netherlands or Germany to see it at its best, where basically none of your points apply.
- It's highway markers look like gel capsules
- Many users put their hometowns so that they're visible when you zoom out really far (you see the suburbs of Salt Lake City & L.A. before you see SLC & L.A.)
- There seems to be 80 airports in every county (I've never heard of most of the ones around my area)
- It's incomplete in many places
- It doesn't even give you directions
I'm sorry, but I just don't trust OpenStreetMaps over Google Maps. I'm sure there aren't many inaccuracies, but it's not worth taking the chance when I'm traveling in an unfamiliar area.