Enthusiasms: Courtney Cook “In Praise of OpenStreetMap”

Last summer, the rumor of a restaurant that was serving mind-bendingly good Nashville hot fried chicken reached my friends and me, so we decided to check it out.

Broken Hearts Burger, (which also serves smash burgers and a delicious thing called a “Michigan dog”), is on Main Street in Fairlee, Vermont, which is, as locals know, a part of VT Route 5—the only road, other than I-91, that runs north along the Connecticut River. It’s not hard to find. Still, I typed the restaurant’s name into my Google Maps app, because I am the type to get distracted and miss the exit.

The routing took me right along Main Street and kept me going north past the Fairlee cemetery. Then it told me to turn left on Mountain Road. At this point, I was skeptical, but I am used to trusting the app, so I kept going. I ended up on a dirt lane, in the middle of a field, without even a data signal. I retraced my turns, got back to the center of Fairlee—and used my eyes instead of my phone to find the restaurant.

“Maps can be geographic. They can be infographic. They might be based on real places, experiences, or data. They might be completely fictitious,” writes Carissa Carter in The Secret Language of Maps. “Maps harbor and expose our assumptions. They allow us to mark what we think is obvious and what is obfuscated, what is noticed and what is hidden.“ It was the idea of mapmaking that hooked me, an English major with no GIS, geography, or computer science training, on geospatial technology.

But in this case, the purpose of the map was material. People get hungry. When the map is wrong, they can’t find their way to food.

In mapmaking, a restaurant is a “point of interest” or POI. POIs are any location that is noteworthy—a hotel, a historical site, an airport, a natural feature like Lake Morey. Some POIs have address points, which is a precise geographic location, usually a street name and building number. (Conversely, some address points are not POIs, like, for example, your house.) Address points and routing data are, in very simple terms, what your mapping app uses to get you where you want to go.

Geospatial data is edited and updated all the time. If you’re a UPS driver, your vehicle is sending data back to mapmaking companies. (This is also true, albeit slightly more indirectly, when you drive your own car, ride a bike or motorcycle, or drive a boat, or ski, or anything else with your phone in your pocket.) Map features also show up on satellite images and things like LiDAR, which uses lasers to create 3D images of topography, vegetation, and buildings. Still, none of these or other methods were likely to relocate the POI “Broken Hearts Burger” from the field at the end of Mountain Road to its correct location at 139 Main Street anytime soon.

I told my friends all of this over our meal. “So how will people be able to find this place?” my friend asked, in between bites of chicken, pickles, and honey butter. “Well,” I said, with the intent to impress, “one thing we can do is fix it in OpenStreetMap.”

With over six billion features mapped and maintained by over ten million volunteers from almost every country since 2004, OpenStreetMap is the largest peer-produced geospatial project of all time. Everyone can edit and use its data for free, though no one can buy it or sell it, and it’s widely recognized as one of the best sources of cartographical truth in the world. Apple and Google use it in their maps; so do Amazon, Microsoft, and countless smaller businesses and NGOs. OpenStreetMap is also incredibly important for humanitarian relief: as of this writing 53,700 buildings and 5600 roads have been mapped in Türkiye and Syria by OSM users since the earthquake in February.

The best part is that you don’t have to be good at geography or geographical information systems to make an edit in OSM; you can just go online and use the tutorial on openstreetmap.org to learn how. Which is how I was able to edit the location of Broken Hearts Burger.

Screen Shot 2023-05-09 at 4.58.47 PM.png

In the highly skilled, highly complex world of mapmaking, being able to edit a POI is a tiny baby step, but even so, it’s immensely satisfying. You get to take something that is important to you—a restaurant, a trailhead, a bench in the shade along a bicycle path, a sculpture park—and locate it in the known and navigable world. To be able to delineate something you know to be ground truth in a legible way is a very cool thing to be able to do. This—and its enormous, global community—is the appeal of OpenStreetMap.

Courtney Cook is a writer who works in a technology company. She lives in Wilder, VT and publishes the weekly newsletter, "Survival by Book," at courtneycook.substack.com.

You’ll find links to all the previous Enthusiasms here.