There is a Strava-based website, Wandrer - https://wandrer.earth .
It marks roads as cycled, awards points for the most roads cycled in some region and allows to download maps/routes for roads not covered yet.
While perhaps not outright hiring the developer, this seems like a perfect inspiration for Mapillary.
Imagine a website that…
Shows roads (and paths!) without [recent] imagery.
Awards points for covering s stretch without images, or without recent images.
Non-covered sections get the most points. Sections with existing images gradually accumulate points, as the imagery gets older.
Points are based on image type/direction (360 vs directional, one direction vs another, maybe image angle etc) and frequency (distance).
Perhaps eventually even scoring images based on sharpness vs blurriness…
Routes can be generated based on various sliders (to prefer roads without any images vs roads with older images and so on) - also based on road category (for example, motorcyclists might want to exclude paths and/or unpaved roads etc).
Routes can be set “A to B with n extra kilometers to collect the most points”, where A and B can be the same spot.
Routes can be downloaded in various formats to use them in GPS devices/phones.
Routes can be used to navigate inside the Mapillary app.
Mapillary app can recalculate routes on the fly (or more likely ask serverside API for that) based on time/distance.
I could spend at least a day writing a functional spec for that
I think this is like a gameified Marketplace, and some of the points you make have already been raised (eg image quality). everything ultimately comes down to limited dev resource, and funds
Yes, several items have been mentioned before. Wandrer seems like a great example to learn from.
I don’t feel qualified to speculate on company detail.
Hi all – Craig from Wandrer here (I saw some referrals from Mapillary in my Wandrer server logs). I think there might be some room for collaboration here to incentivize people to update things in Mapillary.
I do see a fair amount of OSM-related activity driven by Wandrer as people strive to update the cycling accessibility of areas. This is actually a bit of a growing pain at the moment since map updates require a fair amount of recalculations on my end: if a road is removed from the map, then the city/county/district/country that contained it has fewer km of roads to ride, so everyone who has ridden in those areas now has a different completion percent, etc.
It would be a matter of figuring out the right way to incentivize things though. When I first started Wandrer I wanted to partner with cities to improve their municipal imaging and report any infrastructure issues, since I’m encouraging people to travel everywhere, including weird dead-ends that might not get much traffic otherwise. From the limited conversations I had, it seemed like this would be hard to sell to cities. But perhaps there’s some other way to encourage involvement.
Some cities might be interested, but I can imagine it’s hard to get them on board. I can think of one place myself where it could work. I also think the pro-cycle NGO sector could be interested in a project like this. Here in Belgium, there’s also a “save the paths” movement, who might have similar needs. of course, when it comes to funding, you’re talking about finding some sort of specific grant, as they usually can’t pay for this kind of stuff out of pocket.
Hi Craig, thank you for spotting this topic.
At first I thought of some complicated logic to handle map changes (a road might be just missing, constructed, demolished…), but it probably makes sense to keep it simple - what’s in the map counts, that’s it.
BTW, Wandrer seems to exclude highway=service, which sometimes nukes sizable segments. Was that perhaps intended to only exclude service=driveway and service=parking_aisle?
As Joost mentioned, grants might be an option (not related to Mapillary, though). EU does quite a bit on this, and the current CFP is about road safety - although I know nothing about that all
