Thoughts filed in: Mapping

Haiti coverage in OpenStreetMap vs Google Maps

I was recently reading about how OpenStreetMap has been helping the Haiti relief effort, in the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti's capital back in January. Being one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world, Haiti's map coverage is very poor. However, a group of volunteers have radically changed that, and this has directly helped the aid effort on the ground in Haiti.

To see just how effective this volunteer mapping effort has been, I decided to do a quick visual comparison experiment. As of today, here's what downtown Port-au-Prince looks like in Google Maps:

Port-au-Prince in Google Maps
Port-au-Prince in Google Maps

And here it is in OpenStreetMap:

Port-au-Prince in OpenStreetMap
Port-au-Prince in OpenStreetMap