As a motorbike enthusiast, I’ve always enjoyed exploring neighbourhoods on two wheels, while also wanting to contribute something useful to the community Mapillary is a brilliant way to combine the two.
For years though I struggled how to build a route that covers most of the streets in a borough without constantly repeating the same roads or missing streets Being an SWE, I spent a couple of years on and off building a tool to solve what is probably a problem that has already been solved many times before — essentially a variation of the famous travelling salesman problem, but adapted specifically for Mapillary street mapping. With the arrival of the latest AI models, it finally converged into something genuinely useful
The tool lets you select a small region on the map and generates a GPX route covering pretty much all drivable streets while trying to minimise repetition. So far, it works surprisingly well.
BUT right now my biggest problem is finding the navigation app. I’ve tried OsmAnd and Guru Maps, but neither follows the provided GPX track reliably. From time to time they misread my position or direction, and end up snapping to the other section of the track.
Do anyone know an app that will not recalculate or reinterpret the route when the GPS fix is imperfect, but will simply stick to the original GPX track and keep guiding me towards the next waypoint? Ideally, something that treats the GPX route as the source of truth rather than trying to be clever.
If you’d like to give it a go, you’re more than welcome:
Very cool @WASD42 ! The London example on the website works super well!
I don’t have suggestions on an app to follow the .gpx exactly - though ChatGPT has some suggestions, maybe worth trying?
There was some recent discussion of a similar feature that @sukruburakcetin built - I think he takes a slightly different approach of taking road midpoints and passing those to the routing apps rather than the full .gpx.
Maybe I am not seeing everything you are trying to do here, but isn’t the desired output simply a GPS route with multiple waypoints? ie am thinking of something like a gpsbabel job to simplify and convert the GPX track to a series of waypoints. From what I remember the simplify function can be made to only respond to major direction changes, like at any intersection. Waypoint output can then be uploaded to a GPS nav device. I suspect my trusty Garmin would do that but have never tried.
Also possible of course to use the OSM map way joins in a given boundary box (like with overpass) to output a series of waypoints closest to the GPX route or track you have.
Might also be worth having a look at Viking as that has many waypoint and track features.
Nice tool that would be very helpful! As I understand tool ignores current Mapillary coverage and doesn’t allow to avoid streets with fresh imagery and older older imagery?
Mapillary is a brilliant way to combine the two.
