Thunderforest Blog

Introducing Transport Vector

2026-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

A smooth, interactive transit map for developers

We’re excited to launch Transport on our Vector Styles API. You can now build interactive, transport-focused maps with fluid zooming, panning, and rotation.

Whether you’re creating a transit app, logistics dashboard, or urban planning tool, Transport vector allows you to show complex transit networks at a glance.

See the preview of our Transport vector style

Features of Transport on our Vector Styles API

This new version includes all the functionality you expect from our Transport map style, plus the power of client-side rendering:

Interactive maps: tilt, pan, and zoom smoothly
High performance: without loss of detail at lower zoom levels

Detail and performance

We’ve worked (very) hard to ensure Transport vector is as detailed and user-friendly as our existing raster map tiles version.

During the conversion of Transport to a vector style, we tackled problems such as:

Overlapping railway line dashes that were showing as white blobs
Labels fighting for space with icons
Patterns looking pixelated when you zoom
1-pixel polygon outlines that distorted detail at low zooms

We’ve fixed all these issues, and many others. Feedback is always welcome if you spot anything else!

Who is Transport on our Vector Styles API for?

The Transport vector style is ideal for:

Transit, travel, and route-planning apps
Logistics and delivery dashboards
Urban planning tools
Educational or research applications

If your app needs to show transit networks clearly and interactively, our client-side Transport style is the easiest way to get it done.

Getting started with Transport Vector

The Vector Styles API itself provides a MapLibre Style Specification JSON endpoint for each map, along with the supporting endpoints for fonts and icons.

You’ll only need the stylesheet endpoint and the rest will be loaded automatically.

We have a tutorial on using MapLibre with our Vector Styles API. MapLibre is a popular map rendering library, which uses client-side rendering based on vector tiles.

You can also use MapLibre with our Map Tiles API.

The story behind Transport

Transport has always been a “pathfinder” style for Thunderforest. It was the first style we built using CartoCSS, and the first style powered by our Vector Sources API.

Over the years, it has evolved to include unusual transport types like chairlifts and funiculars, and to solve complex cartography challenges like overlapping bus routes and large transit interchanges.

The launch of Transport on our Vector Styles API is the next step in this evolution — giving you full access to our specialised transit map in a way that’s fast, flexible, and interactive.

Multi-Currency Billing

2026-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

We now offer billing in EUR, USD and GBP.

If you’re a new customer you can choose your billing currency when you sign up. You can toggle between the currencies on the pricing page, using the options on the top right of the pricing plans.

If you’re an existing customer, and you’d prefer to switch your billing currency, just send us an email. Let us know which currency you’d like, and we’ll take care of switching over your account for you.

Being able to pay in your domestic currency can mean that you:

Save on any currency conversion fees from your card provider
Save on any additional per-transaction fees that your card provider might add
Less work for your finance team and your bookkeepers during reconciliations!

We offer a fixed monthly price in each currency, so that you know exactly what you’ll be paying per month. Please see our pricing page for more information, and please get in touch if you have any questions.

Geomob Podcast: Early Days of OpenStreetMap

2023-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

It was OpenStreetMap’s 19th Birthday in August, and having been part of the project for most of its history, I was invited back on to the Geomob Podcast to discuss some of the early days with the host, Ed Freyfogle. We covered a range of topics, including what’s changed over the years, the challenges of preserving motivation in the community, and that time when we unintentionally deleted big chunks of the map of Poland!

You can listen to the episode using the embedded player below, or on your favourite podcast app (look for episode 193). I’ve also included a transcript below, with some section headings if you want to skip ahead.

Introductions
Getting involved in OpenStreetMap
Early Mapping Parties
Full-time OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap Everywhere
New possibilities
Can we maintain OpenStreetMap?
Getting Started Today
OpenStreetMap in 20 years from now
Final Memories
Wrapping Up

Introductions

Ed: Welcome to the GeoMob podcast, where we discuss geo innovation in any and all forms, whether for fun or profit.

Ed: Welcome back, everyone. Time for another episode of the GeoMob podcast, and this is quite a special episode because it is OpenStreetMap’s 19th Birthday. This episode should be coming out - I’m not even sure exactly when the birthday is, I think it’s August 8th is celebrated as the birthday, which was declared the birthday because that was the day that the OpenStreetMap.org domain was registered, if I recall correctly. So today I have as my guest an old friend and someone who was involved in the very, very early days of OpenStreetMap and remains very involved to this day. And we’re going to kind of reminisce about some of the early days back in London, when OpenStreetMap was just getting started, and reflect on those special times, but also then how things are looking for the future of the project. So welcome back, Andy Allan. Great to have you here on the show again. You were a guest all the way back in episode 10 of the podcast, which is, a lot of water under the bridge since then. So, great to have you on the show, Andy.

Andy: Yeah thanks Ed. Thanks for inviting me back again.

Ed: For those that don’t know you and who maybe weren’t regular listeners back in episode 10, very briefly tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do and and your involvement with OpenStreetMap.

Andy: I’m Andy Allan. I’m the founder of Thunderforest and we make activity specific maps for developers, and it’s all based on OpenStreetMap. I’m also with the maintainer, or one of the two maintainers, of the OpenStreetMap.org website code base. So every week I’m working on that. And I’ve been involved in OpenStreetMap since 2006. So that’s a few years now.

Ed: So that was also when I got into OpenStreetMap, 2006 as well. And I don’t actually even remember when I met you, Andy, but it must have been at either a mapping party or at a pub meetup, kind of in that, in that time period.

Getting involved in OpenStreetMap

Ed: Um, take us back, tell us your first memories of OpenStreetMap and how you got involved in the project.

Andy: So there’s three things that got me into OpenStreetMap, and the first one was, I’d been doing some travelling and when I was abroad all the maps were rubbish. They just weren’t, just couldn’t find any good maps. And I’d been doing some open source stuff, I’d been doing some creative commons stuff. And I’d been wandering around trying to find paths on holiday, like go for a nice walk and thinking, wouldn’t it be great if there was some kind of, all the people getting together and some kind of open license doing some maps.

So that idea was burbling at the back of my head. When I came back to the UK, I’d seen a couple of blog posts from an [Open Source] developer called Tom Chance, and he had come across this project called OpenStreetMap. And the second time I saw him mentioning it, I thought, you know what, this, this fits in. This is the kind of thing that I’m interested in doing.

So I had a little bit more of a look into it and realized that the third thing that had been bubbling in my head had been I really wanted to buy a Garmin GPS, but I had no good excuse for spending like £150 on a GPS. And so when I thought, hey, I could buy a Garmin with the excuse being that I’m doing something useful with it by contributing to OpenStreetMap, then that made me go out and spend the money and that made me start contributing to OpenStreetMap.

Ed: Maybe we should set the context for some of our younger listeners because they may not even know how it used to be that people used to contribute to OpenStreetMap, because now you know you just go to the website and you click Edit. Exactly. It used to be you would go walk around with your GPS device, record where you went and I should say GPS device because obviously there were no smartphones at that time. So you had a special device and you would record where you went, and of course on a piece of paper maybe you could take some notes and write down like, oh, at, you know, at 10.37, I was at this place, or whatever, so that later you could line up the trace to where it went. And then what? Then you would go home, and then what would happen? Take us through this process, because I think people may not even believe it.

Andy: Yeah, I mean it was, it was hard to explain back then because when I got started, there was only about 20 or 30 roads in London in OpenStreetMap. Everything was blank and we didn’t have any aerial imagery to trace over. We only had Landsat imagery, which had like, I don’t know, a hundred meter resolution. So you could see where London was, but you couldn’t see any of the streets. And yeah, we had to walk up and down, walk the length of every street, with the GPS recording every second, so that we had this line of breadcrumbs, or this network of breadcrumbs.

And as you say, first it was like writing on bits of paper, and then buying digital cameras so that you could take endless photos of street signs. When we’d go back home, we’d, fire up JOSM and start to trace over your little line of breadcrumbs to draw the streets and then add the road names and press save.

I think the key thing that a lot of people can’t imagine is we didn’t get to see the output after we pressed save. This is back in the time before the slippy maps were available, when there was a applet which loaded the map from the database and drew little white lines over Landsat background, and it would only be working for an hour or two per week.

It used to be a thing, you’d need to wait until midweek until, I don’t even know what the technical problems were, but there’d be one afternoon you would see the new things showing on the map and be like, quick, quick, take a screenshot whilst it’s still there before it all stops working again. So it was really early days.

Ed: Well, that is a very good point because I think people, people don’t realize all of that was invented around the same time. I mean, Google Maps had just come out. In like 2005, I think, early 2005, 2004, maybe. And, and that was the first time you could kind of move the map, you could drag the map. And of course, Google Maps, when it came out, only had the U.S. It didn’t have…, the rest of the world was just blank. And then eventually they added the U.K. And then it was only later that Europe and other places came on. Obviously there was no satellite imagery, or what they call satellite imagery, aerial imagery. I mean, this was very different.

And, and people were just, I mean, what you could do in terms of putting a pin on the map and all that, it was like every week something new was being invented. It was really, it was so dynamic what was happening. And then I remember for me, the thing that really got me into it was that, that O’Reilly book came out. Google Maps Hacks. When that came out, I bought that book, and I was like, Oh my God, this is really amazing, what people are doing now, and things, And of course, we were both fortunate in that we happened to be in London, at that time. And so, then the whole, the scene kind of came about, and we started having kind of the pub meetups, and the mapping parties.

Early Mapping Parties

Ed: Tell us, were you, were you at some of the earliest mapping parties? Give us your impressions of those kind of events, or how did it all work?

Andy: So I missed the first couple of mapping parties. They happened just before I got involved, but it was still very early days. And I remember, I’d been involved just through the mailing lists, and seeing people talking and all the different discussions going on.

The first event that I went along to had the titans of OpenStreetMap were there. Steve Coast was doing a presentation. Etienne, who was one of the early developers, did a lot of work on OsmaRender and things like that. He was there. Richard Fairhurst turned up to demonstrate a new editor that he’d been working on, where you didn’t have to draw each node individually first, you could draw a line and it would automatically put in the nodes. So that that was like technologically cool. But also it was just so cool how welcoming everybody was, because I’d been reading, you know like being a sort of passive participant in the mailing list. I turned up and everyone was super friendly and they would buy me a beer and it was, it was great.

So I was hooked straight away. And then, things, as you say, things happen so quickly. Like there were so many mapping parties going on every couple of weeks. Different places in London. Loads of enthusiastic people finding the project and getting involved. So yeah, so I remember lots of that. I do remember lots of beer was involved. So, some of the memories are slightly faded by time, but it was, it was a great time.

Ed: Yes, I can remember doing a mapping party where we met at the, it was on a Saturday and we met at the Multi-Map office. I don’t know if you remember that, it was on Fleet Street, and it was truly, the pie chart where everyone got their wedge of the pie. So there was a there was a map of London someone had printed out, and we we drew the different sectors and each one… then we all split up and went out and mapped and at this point you could still… literally you were writing in the names of all the streets or things that had never been mapped. The map was empty in places and this was still actually pretty late, this must have been like 2008 or so. There were still streets that were unnamed or whatever. Anyway, so then we all, and then we meet back up at the pub and everyone, uh, yeah, lots of beers. And then of course then that night, or maybe the next day, depending on how many beers you had, you actually had to upload all the data and watch the map fill in.

And it was really, it felt like there was something happening. You know, it really felt like… But that being said, It was also still core things, but, but then the question was always like, is this ever actually going to be useful for anyone? Any memories of the first time you saw someone actually making use of the map?

Andy: Ooh, that’s interesting. I do remember the first time I saw the maps going onto Garmin devices because somebody had reverse engineered how the Garmin proprietary map format worked. And when we started being able to load up what we’d already done on OpenStreetMap onto the Garmin devices, that was just cool in itself. Because because all the people could use it. But it was also super helpful for us because you could see, we’ve already done those.

Full-time OpenStreetMap

Ed: When exactly did you start working on OpenStreetMap because you were, if I recall correctly, you were the first employee of Steve and Nick when they started a company, which I think then is that what became CloudMade, or first they had another company. This was like the, the ZXY or whatever company, or I forget the exact name. And you were their first employee. You were their first team member. So what, what made you make that leap?

Andy: Yeah, so I was doing all this just as a hobby, including doing things like, creating what became OpenCycleMap, which was one of the first kind of themed maps that were available.

All that was just as a hobby whilst I had a proper job elsewhere. And then, Steve Nick had set up ZXY as a small consultancy, and they hired somebody to work there. Part of what they did was start pitching around for how to make a big company, like a VC backed company, to build on top of what OpenStreetMap was making available.

So when they got their first round of funding they went out to hire a bunch of people, and I was one of the first people to say yes. To chuck in the proper job, working in the public sector and go and work for Steve and Nick on their crazy startup idea. I was looking back at the timeline today and, I can’t believe how quickly everything happened between signing up - for me that was October 2006 that I signed up - and then April 2008. So less than two years later, I’m like chucking in the career and like doing OpenStreetMap as a full time thing. So, the pace that things were changing at, was huge. So I joined CloudMade in early 2008 and a rollercoaster ride for the next 18 months, learning a whole lot about how the world works and what’s involved in running a startup.

Ed: Tell us a bit about that experience. I mean, what, what did you work on? What were you building? What was your task?

Andy: It follows the line of what most startups based on OpenStreetMap have done over the years, except CloudMade was the first. So, being able to take the OpenStreetMap data and offer maps, offer geocoding, offer routing, offer all these kind of services that commercial players, or commercial organizations, want to use, but they don’t want to get down and dirty with the raw OpenStreetMap data themselves. So we had to, like, invent a lot of these things from scratch. There wasn’t existing open source software for some of these things.

A big chunk of the effort in the company was trying to prove this market existed, so there was lots of skepticism that A, OpenStreetMap was useful as it was, or B, that OpenStreetMap would ever be useful, and see whether anybody would be willing to pay for it. That took a lot of effort, and I think it shows that they were right, because even now, decades later, there’s plenty of companies who are following that same path, and plenty of businesses who are looking for those kind of services.

OpenStreetMap Everywhere

Ed: Do you ever just sit back and reflect, Andy, on like now, I mean, now OpenStreetMap is everywhere. It’s used by some of the biggest companies in the world. Are you ever just amazed that it actually worked?

Andy: Yeah, and that was a big thing back in these early days, back in the kind of like 2006, 2008 era, was like, is it going to work? Is it possible? There was a lot of people in the industry who just couldn’t imagine that there would be enough volunteers to map every street in the UK, for example. Never mind every building, or points of interest or anything else like that.

So I think it was interesting to try and figure out, is it possible, what would be needed to be possible, do we have enough volunteers, can we get enough volunteers, but it’s also interesting that a lot of people just didn’t worry about it and just got on with it. Because everyone was having fun, so, is it feasible or not, people didn’t… most mappers were just, doing the mapping parties, going out and mapping and not really worrying about these kind of existential questions.

Ed: For me, one of the big aha moments was, I did not go to the very first State of the Map, which was in Manchester, even though my company sponsored it, which is one of the things I’m very proud of that we had the foresight at that time to sponsor the very first State of the Map, but I did make it to, I think it was the second one in Limerick.

I don’t know. Were you, were you there for that one?

Andy: Yeah.

Ed: And, first of all, it was great. But a lot of people came. I mean, a lot of people from all over, not just, of course, there were all the people from London and stuff, but then all of a sudden you saw these people from, you know, all across Europe. There were people from Japan there, and stuff. And then, they rigged up kind of the very first kind of improvisational video conference and we had people like calling in from, I remember some guys from like Ethiopia who called in from Addis Ababa and they were like, yeah, we’re mapping our city.

A big part of the conference was people would just like show different maps of different parts of the world and just be like, you know, Oh my God, who’s, who the hell is mapping in Bolivia or, you know, Oh my God, look, some, someone mapped the city in Indonesia or whatever. And, you know, for the first time, I was like, wow, this is pretty wild.

I mean that all these people are coming out of the woodwork, and of course there were many many technical problems to still be overcome and disagreements, and some of the personalities were a bit abrasive or whatever. But you could for the first time see like wow, this there’s really something here. There’s really something happening.

I do worry to a degree of whether that that gets lost now in OpenStreetMap, because it’s almost become so big. And also frankly, because in many areas, many things are already mapped. Although in my experience, you can always find more things to map. I mean, everywhere. Even in Germany, which is like one of the most mapped countries, there’s still tons of stuff to map in terms of house numbers and points of interest or whatever, but, even the occasional street. What’s your take on that?

Andy: Yeah, I remember Limerick as well, and that people would just turn up and talk about mapping their own town because in those days, it wasn’t necessarily a given that a large town like with 100,000 people in it, it might not have been mapped at that point, even in the UK.

Ed: I mean, it might be a point. It might be a point with a name.

Andy: Yeah. So, some people would turn up with these super detailed maps of places or, castles in Japan and things like that. That was great. But it really showed how much it was driven by the idea and not the practicalities of it.

Because we didn’t have a good technical set up and there wasn’t much data there. It wasn’t super useful for any practical purposes, but there were still people who were willing to pay thousands to fly around the world to come to a hotel in Ireland and say I’ve been mapping in my area and to hang out with other mappers.

So it shows how strong that idea was. But it wasn’t a fully formed thing. There was lots of changes and like you say, disagreements, on how the project should be organized, should Steve remain in charge of everything or set up a foundation to make it more democratic. And these things were all high drama, but also happened really quickly as well.

Lots of stuff changed in a short period of time.

New possibilities

Ed: Well, let’s shift focus a little, Andy, and rather than just reminiscing about the past, what’s your impression of the current state of affairs, but also the future? So, first up, let me ask, as someone who was there in the very beginning, when it was literally making the map by hand and drawing it on a piece of paper or whatever, and then, you know, manually entering that, what’s your take on all the new technological possibilities?

You know, like all the aerial imagery, the machine learning to extract the buildings from the imagery, all this kind of stuff, the cameras you can put in your car, all of it that can create the map for you. How do you, what’s your opinion?

Andy: So I’m very pro all of that, but with an important caveat in that I see all of this as tools for individual mappers to make their life easier, not as a replacement for volunteers.

So, going back to those early days, aerial imagery is great because it meant that I didn’t have to walk to the end of every street with a GPS, so that made it better. Better resolution imagery meant I could trace the buildings. If something else can trace the buildings, and I just need to click and say, these ones are right, but that’s actually a tennis court that looks like a building, then that’s fine for me.

What I’m really not that interested in is when people start feeding the data straight into OpenStreetMap and bypassing the community members. And it’s a tricky area because a lot of techie people see OpenStreetMap as a technological project. And so if they can make some better tech to kind of automatically update OpenStreetMap or things like that then they don’t see what the downsides of it are.

But as we were just discussing, it’s really not a tech project because we didn’t have tech when the project was starting off. It’s really a social project. It’s how to find volunteers, to motivate people, to get people interested in their own community, and to make sure that they’re always in charge of what’s going on in the map.

So I’m pro all these tracing and AI and things like that, if they are tools for for the mappers to use, and if they’re given to the people who have the most vested interest in their area of the map or their type of mapping.

Can we maintain OpenStreetMap?

Ed: But one of the challenges I see there, though, is, as I said, it was it was a lot of fun back in the early days because we were literally filling in the map, right?

You know, you find a road that hadn’t been mapped and you add it and then you get the satisfaction of of eventually seeing it render on the map. And I do say eventually, because, as you say, it could often be a process of days back then. But now, that’s much more rare, especially if you’re in a big city that’s already well mapped and, okay, maybe you can add the opening hours of a store or something, but it’s become much more about maintenance rather than creation, right?

And maintenance is just, for the vast majority of people, it’s just less motivating. So… You know, do we run the risk that there is no community? The community kind of burns out because it’s like, who wants to just do maintenance, right? How do we, how do we find the ways to keep people excited?

And there have been some good approaches to this with the various apps that do the gamification, like the Street Complete and stuff like that. And MapRoulette, but I worry that, particularly in these places that are already well mapped, It’s hard to… Is the passion still there that we saw in the early days, and can that be recreated?

Andy: Yeah, the maintenance issue is definitely a big one because it’s not as rewarding, as compelling to walk down the street to just check the name of that point of interest is the same as what’s on OpenStreetMap and the opening hours haven’t changed in the last six months, compared to adding stuff in for the first time.

I think anything which is being used and being useful will end up being maintained. I find it super massively useful when I’m away from home using OpenStreetMap and seeing points of interest, and what the opening hours are for this bakery in a small village somewhere is super useful and so I have the motivation to fix that when they’re wrong

Not necessarily the motivation to go and survey an entire town, but the individual things that I’m using, I’ll keep up to date, but it is a big challenge. And I think the thing that will work best is relentlessly increasing the number of people who are editing OpenStreetMap and who are interested in editing OpenStreetMap.

Because you might not be able to find people who are doing, like, six hours a day, both days of the weekend, going and doing surveying. That was super common 18 years ago, but not so much anymore. But many hands make light work, so it’s making sure that we get all the different people involved.

Ed: Yes, that’s a good point.

I mean, I know there have been some efforts to do things like get involved with schools and organizations like the boy scouts or the scouts or whatever, where you continually have a new stream of new people and and thus for them they have the excitement of kind of seeing it for the first time and thus they maintain their area and things like that.

Getting Started Today

Ed: What would be your advice for someone maybe listening right now, who has just joined OpenStreetMap or who’s younger and they’re just getting into it? Any thoughts? What would you, what message would you leave them with?

Andy: So the first message is, sign up, click edit, and start editing. It’s… I come across more and more people who are slightly daunted by the whole project and the concept of, are we really allowed to just make changes?

Ed: Isn’t that perverse, Andy? Because it’s actually easier than ever to edit. It’s easier than ever.

Andy: Yeah, yeah, definitely. But I think as the overall quality of OpenStreetMap goes up, people are slightly afraid of making mistakes. So I would say step one, definitely just, just click edit, get going, press save, and keep doing it. Don’t stand on ceremony or worry about it too much.

And the second thing is, to focus on the stuff that’s important to you. That’s what you’ll find the most enjoyment from. So, if your local park is important to you, then go and add the drinking water fountains, go and add the playground equipment, and things like that. If access for wheelchair users is important for you, then go and add the wheelchair mapping tags to your local shops. So focus on the things that are important to you, and the things that you are seeing benefit from yourself. Like, if you are using one of the alternative layers on OpenStreetMap or an app that shows particular things, then focus on that.

Then when you’re into it, expand your horizons to try and complete your local area or take on a bigger challenge like sorting out the addressing for your town, or things like that. But the first steps are definitely dive in, and then focus on things that you’re interested in

Ed: All right, very wise words. Thanks.

OpenStreetMap in 20 years from now

Ed: Where, where do you think, I mean this year was the 19th birthday, so we’re almost turning 20 with the project, where do you think OpenStreetMap will be in 20 years time?

Andy: I think it will be everywhere. It took a few years when I was trying to figure out where OpenStreetMap would sit alongside all the other sources of map data. And we’ve just about got to the point now where everyone’s happy that it’s OpenStreetMap. There’s always some question marks as to whether or not there’ll be other free datasets, like the machine generated data that people could be using as an alternative to OpenStreetMap. But I don’t think that will be the case.

I think OpenStreetMap has got a few things ahead of itself over the next 20 years on quality assurance and ensuring mistakes or any deliberate vandalism gets caught before it goes into the main database, because there’s a few big organizations who still want to keep their own data, like local councils or national organizations who have their own datasets, and they mostly want to put these into OpenStreetMap, but they’re always just a little bit concerned about people messing around with it, with the data and whether or not they can rely on it 24/7.

So I think that’s one part of the story that OpenStreetMap needs to focus on, is making sure that these data issues are caught ahead of time. For the last 18 years, it’s been very quickly cleaned up afterwards, but that doesn’t suit everyone. And I think when those bits are taken care of, that’ll be the last few use cases where people aren’t willing to use OpenStreetMap for their data. And, when it turns out that every local council, every organisation, every commercial company is one way or another using OpenStreetMap for their maps, then that will also help with a lot of the maintenance challenges because these companies and organisations themselves will be 100% invested in keeping their data up to date.

Ed: We do see that with some of our geocoding customers, you know, they have that aha moment of realizing, they find a bug and then we explain to them, they can fix the bug and then not all, but some of them do then start to start fixing the bugs and actually clean things up and whatever.

One question, Andy, I mean, the same way you mentioned people are, you see that some people are scared to edit because,they see that OpenStreetMap is not so good and they’re worried about making a mistake, one worry that I have is that, you know, big fundamental changes, are we as a community scared to make big fundamental changes anymore because we have a thing that’s kind of halfway working, right?

So, so a change like what you’re talking about, of some sort of, you know, catching the errors before they go live, or whatever, have some sort of staging process, whatever, however it would be solved, right? I mean, this is a complex problem, right? That will require complex technology, but also, a change to the current workflow and a change to how people are just interacting with things and, are we even as a group able to make those big complex changes anymore?

Andy: Yeah, it’s definitely difficult to make these big changes now. I remember being in a hack weekend in the CloudMade offices in Putney, when we had the developers of all the editors, and all the tools that use the data from the database. And you could get everybody involved into one room and say, we’re going to change the API this weekend.Who wants to write the SQL migration code for that?

Those days aren’t repeatable anymore. Far too many people involved in far, far too many systems.

Ed: Yeah, that’s long gone.

Andy: And so things haven’t changed, and I would say it’s because it’s more than halfway useful. It’s like 95% of everything that we need. So I don’t think there are big fundamental changes that are needed. There’s definitely a coordination problem. But most of the effort over the last few years have been going into this kind of horizontal expansion of OpenStreetMap, of dealing with so many people involved in so many different parts of the world and the tools needed for adding all these different things in.

So, I know a lot of people are of the opinion OpenStreetMap hasn’t changed just because the API is the same version as it has been for years, or the website hasn’t had to redesign for a while. But it’s an order of magnitude different in activity. I think, I think that is probably reaching its peak now. OpenStreetMap is thoroughly active everywhere around the world. I no longer have people asking me, when is it going to be useful in France, for example. So I think now the development can refocus on that last 5% of a few small changes we can make here and there to optimize it further.

Final Memories

Ed: Well, alright. I guess we, I mean, obviously we could reminisce for quite some time, Andy, but I guess we should probably wrap it up there with that optimistic look towards the future, but, unless you have any final memories back from the glory days that you want to share with the audience? Did you ever accidentally delete the whole world or anything like that, or that you now want to admit to, or you want to…?

Andy: Well, there was a problem when I got put in charge of the redaction bot when we changed the license and someone had to run the tool that was going to remove all the data that we couldn’t use under the new ODbL license. And there was a point where, unfortunately, some wires have been crossed about what could be preserved in Poland. And so vast chunks of Poland were accidentally deleted at the start of this license bot. So that’s definitely one memory.

Another memory, was… I did some work with the hardware guys, Tom and Grant, many years ago. And one day we were moving the OpenStreetMap database server, like THE OpenStreetMap database server, from a PhD office in the University College London to a proper data centre at Imperial College London.

And so we switched off OpenStreetMap, like all of OpenStreetMap got switched off. We took the Database out and we put it in the back of the van and then we had to try and use our local knowledge to figure out which route had the fewest speed bumps so that we were least likely to break any of the hard drives. So planning a route across and down Park Lane instead of through the middle of Hyde Park just to avoid the speed bumps and then the nervousness and the pressure knowing that all of OpenStreetMap was offline and was waiting on the two of us getting this database server from one place to another. That’s quite an abiding memory as well.

Ed: You had the whole world in your hands there, Andy. That you could… Those were fun days. Those were fun days.

Wrapping Up

Ed: The other point, the other seed I want to plant in your head, Andy, is we gotta figure out what we’re gonna do for next year for the 20th birthday. I’m trying to get it going that we have some kind of a big event in London. So all I need is for other people to organize it and I’m happy to show up. So if you can get working on that…!

Very fun conversation to reminisce about the good old days, and the many good days to come.

I mean, one of the thing that’s great about OpenStreetMap, I have to say that I enjoy is, it truly is a hobby. First of all, that’s global. I mean, you can meet people from all over the world, anywhere you go, you can participate in it. And there are local communities now, but also it’s a hobby that young and old can do, right?

So, you know, now my son is 12 and, you know, so we start, when we go for a hike and, we pull up the app and we do a little bit of mapping or whatever. So, kids can do it all the way up through, it’s a hobby we’ll be able to do the rest of our lives. I look forward to many happy mapping events to come, and perhaps also the occasional beer after the mapping event.

So, on that cheery note, thanks for coming on the show. Ah, one final point, Andy, if anyone wants to get in touch, how should they contact you? If they want to correct your memory about some of those events from back in the day?

Andy: Yeah, there’s definitely some corrections might be needed for some of the anecdotes!

I am @gravitystorm@gravitystorm.co.uk on Mastodon. And if you want any other contacts, then gravitystorm.co.uk has the full list.

Ed: Fantastic. We’ll get that in the show notes, of course. Great talking with you, Andy. And I will see you at the next Geomob in London. Bye.

Andy: Great. Thanks again.

Ed: Thanks for joining us today and listening to the Geomob podcast. We hope you enjoyed the discussion. Please get in touch with us if you have any feedback or suggestions for topics we should cover. You can get the show notes over on the website, which is at thegeomob.com. While you’re there, you can sign up for our monthly mailing list where we keep you informed about upcoming events.

You can of course also follow us on Twitter where our handle is Geomob. Thanks for listening and hope to see you at a Geomob event soon.

Software Insights: osm2pgsql with Jochen Topf

2022-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Thunderforest has been sponsoring the osm2pgsql software project since early 2020. It’s a key piece of open-source technology that we rely on, and we’re very happy to support the team behind it. We use osm2pgsql to process and load OpenStreetMap data into our PostGIS databases, which we then use for creating our whole range of maps. It might seem at first like loading this data into the databases would be a reasonably straightforward task. But when you consider handling complex features like bicycle, hiking and public transport route relations, or assembling huge forest polygons with tens of thousands of corners from hundreds of individual OpenStreetMap ways, and then add on top the challenges of processing the incremental “diff updates” that we pull in from OpenStreetMap every few hours, then there’s more complexity to osm2pgsql than initially meets the eye.

Jochen Topf is one of the lead developers of osm2pgsql, and we worked together on the initial concept for what became osm2pgsql’s “flex backend” in 2019. More recently, in early 2022 Jochen worked on speeding up our “diff update” processing, including by making changes to the way we process geometries for our vector tiles. Some ideas from that work will be heading upstream to osm2pgsql in the near future.

Last month Jochen and I met up at the annual OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference. It was great to see the continuing interest in osm2pgsql, particularly in the Birds of a Feather session, and it was great to have a chance to catch up with Jochen in person too.

Andy: Do you remember when you first got involved in osm2pgsql? What was it that you worked on back then?

Jochen: Osm2pgsql has a long history of different contributors. Looking into the commit log, my first contribution was a typo fix in 2007. So I have known and used osm2pgsql for a long time. But I started with serious contributions only in November 2019, first lots of code and build system clean-ups to get more familiar with the code and then implementing the flex output.

Andy: What have you been working on more recently?

Jochen: Because osm2pgsql is an old project there were lots of corners where we needed to modernize and clean up the code. That’s the background task I keep working on. This lead to some huge performance improvements in the non-slim import code for instance, and a lot more robust code with less bugs. And I continue to work on the flex output and make it more flexible still. Lately the work has been around refactoring a lot of the geometry processing code and making it accessible from the Lua configuration.

Andy: Other than loading data into PostGIS for map rendering, what else can osm2pgsql be used for?

Jochen: Because a PostGIS database is such a versatile tool, there are endless possibilities here. Rendering into raster or vector maps is just the most visible use case (in more than one sense). The other important use case that comes to mind is geocoding. The Nominatim geocoder used, for instance, on openstreetmap.org uses osm2pgsql for data imports. You can also analyze the OSM data in many ways once you have it in a PostGIS database, for instance to calculate road lengths, analyze the public transport network or figure out where to put up a wind turbine that’s far away from residential buildings but close to existing power lines. Its is also a great tool to do (ad-hoc) queries for finding bad or inconsistent data in OSM.

Andy: When you sit down to work on osm2pgsql, how do you prioritise where to put your efforts, for example between routine code maintenance or developing new features?

Jochen: Important bug fixes usually come first, of course, and I also try to stay on top of reported issues and participate in discussions on GitHub. Helping users with their small problems often isn’t much effort but can have a huge impact on their use of and happiness with osm2pgsql. Often this leads to me finding some small thing in the code that could be improved and, if the effort isn’t too large, I’ll just do that. Not just fixing the immediate problem, but making the code or the manual a bit better each time you look at it, makes for huge progress in the long run. Serious development needs more time though, so that will usually happen every few weeks when there is time in my schedule. There are no hard and fast rules on what gets priority, but an important consideration is how many users will probably benefit (and whether a paying customer does). Often something gets priority that doesn’t seem like an important thing, just because I know it will enable lots of other improvements down the line.

Andy: What’s next in your plans for osm2pgsql?

Jochen: I am still working on improving the geometry processing facilities of osm2pgsql. This means that more geometry processing can be done on the fly while the data is imported into the database, instead of having it to do afterwards. I am also looking into adding more functionality around supporting geometry generalization with the help of PostGIS. This should make it easier for users to generate simplified data for rendering on lower zoom levels.

You can follow regular updates on the development work and new version releases on the osm2pgsql website. You can also consider joining Thunderforest in sponsoring the development of osm2pgsql.

Andy Interviewed on the Geomob Podcast (2020)

2021-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Just under a year ago (which seems like a long, long time ago right now!) I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Ed Freyfogle for the then-brand-new Geomob Podcast. We discussed a wide variety of topics, including the joys of spotting Thunderforest maps on Polish TV, the challenges of building a business based on OpenStreetMap, the impact of large companies in the OpenStreetMap mapping community, business models, my advice for those thinking of starting their own business, and more. When the podcast episode was released a few weeks later, we received lots of great listener feedback, so I hope you enjoy it too!

You can listen to the episode using the embedded player here, or on your favourite podcast app (look for episode 10). I’ve also included a cleaned-up transcript below.

Geomob Podcast - 10. Interview with Andy Allan of Thunderforest (transcript)

Ed: Welcome to the Geomob podcast, where we discuss geoinnovation in any and all forms, be it for fun or profit.

Ed: Welcome back everyone to episode nine of the Geomob podcast. I am looking forward to today’s conversation because we have a very long time Geomobster, Andy Allan, who was based in London and now lives in Poland. He’s one of the early members of the OpenStreetMap community in London and also he’s the founder of an online mapping service called Thunderforest, so lots of things to talk about. Andy, welcome to the podcast.

Andy: Hi, thanks for having me.

Ed: Our pleasure. Our pleasure man. So let’s dive right in. What is Thunderforest? What do you do there?

Andy: Thunderforest is a company that I own and run that provides map services for small businesses. If you want maps on your website or in your application, you’re a developer, you’re looking for some great maps, then you come to Thunderforest. And we specialize particularly in activity maps. So instead of generic background maps or… you come to us when you’re looking for maps for cyclists or for hiking or public transport or some kind of specialist map like that. That’s really what we focus on.

Ed: And the maps are made using OpenStreetMap, correct? That’s the…

Andy: Yeah, we use a couple of minor sources, but 90% of what you see on our maps all comes from OpenStreetMap, and it’s really OpenStreetMap that allows our business to exist. If it wasn’t for OpenStreetMap, if it wasn’t for all the interesting details that are there, we wouldn’t be able to make interesting maps. So if we decided to try and use a different supplier like TomTom or TeleAtlas, they’ll have roads. Maybe they’ve got a few foot paths, but that’s it. And it would be really limiting on the kind of thing that we can make. But with OpenStreetMap - yeah, the world is your oyster, there’s all kinds of really interesting niche things that you can pull out of the data and display on the maps. So it’s really key that it comes from from OpenStreetMap and I was involved in OpenStreetMap long before I started making maps, long before Thunderforest appeared. So it was really a project and a company that’s grown out of a hobby, rather than a business idea that was looking for data.

Ed: Well nevertheless it seems to be a thriving business. You’ve been doing it for quite a few years now and I’ve seen the maps in lots of places so congratulations to you.

Andy: Yeah, thanks. It’s been going for more than 10 years now, so it’s growing rapidly, still, which is great. And yeah, there’s all kinds of different places that you find Thunderforest maps cropping up. It’s really pleasing when you spot somebody on the tram, or on the underground, using an app, and you see over their shoulder, you can recognize the maps. And we even had recently where we were watching a TV show, a Polish language TV show and I had to pause and point out to my wife, look, that’s my map up on the screen.

Ed: That’s awesome man, congratulations. That must have been a deja vu type moment. That’s cool.

Andy: Yeah, it’s really weird. But it’s kinda awesome when you can recognize something and, I mean if you’re a big enough map geek, even if it’s just like blurry in the background, you can be like, no, I recognize this because of that, so yeah, good moment.

Ed: As someone who also has a business that’s based on OpenStreetMap primarily, OpenCage, our geocoding service. We get asked a lot about maps because customers will come to us and they’ll say, “Oh, do you also do maps or not”? And we we very often recommend Thunderforest because you have so many great designs. I mean, as you say, some of the activity maps like OpenCycleMap, but you also have some really just wacky ones like Spinal Map, the heavy metal style, which is a lot of fun to look at. So what is the process? How do you create these styles? How do you get the ideas for them? How much work is it to create a style? How does that happen?

Andy: So there’s a few different places that the ideas come from. The most important one is existing customers. When they’re asking for something, like, they like our maps but it doesn’t quite fit what they’re needing for their new application. So those ideas come in and they pile up and eventually when enough people have asked for one of them, then we can develop that. So we’ve got a couple of styles on the go at the moment, which are under development but really based on what customers are looking for. And then of course there’s just having fun. The technology that I’ve been working on in order to make it easy for me to host different map styles means we can just do things for fun. And it’s not like there’s a big infrastructure cost or anything like that. So I’ve worked with Richard Fairhurst who you know well, and many of your listeners will know, and gave him free reign and said, come up with some styles that I haven’t thought of. And that’s where Spinal Map came from, that’s where our Pioneer map, which is a sort of 1800s themed railway map came from as well. Those are great ideas from Richard that worked really well with our infrastructure. And so it means that when other customers come to us, we’ve got these kind of “use your imagination” styles. So I had a games development company who came, they were looking for a medieval themed map, and they could really see from the Spinal map and from Pioneer that it’s not just serious maps that you can make, you can really push the limits with our infrastructure.

Ed: Yeah, this is really a case where the medium of a podcast doesn’t do it justice, so I strongly recommend all the listeners take 10 minutes and go browse the site and we’ll make sure we get links in the show notes that people can check it out. There are some that are really, really fun, but also some that are very beautiful. I like your topographic maps. How much fine tuning has to go on or is the map ever done? Are you continually finding new things to tweak and add and isn’t that a risk that you are just endlessly fine tuning?

Andy: Yeah, so there’s two aspects to the fine tuning. One is, it doesn’t take that long to make a new map style and to get the kind of broad brush strokes. So that it shows the features you want to show; gets that kind of use case. But then there’s all kinds of minor details, because the world’s a big and complicated place. There’s so many different things. Cable car stations are one that I was working last week on for the Outdoors map. We’ve had cable cars for ages. Actually when you’re using the map you realize sometimes that cable car stations need to be shown. And so that kind of endlessly adding more details or finding new places on the map where it’s not clear. Or I look at one of my maps and think - I could do this better if I tweak this a little bit, use a different icon, move things around a bit. That process is endless. And then there’s the second challenge, which is the big challenge with OpenStreetMap, in that OpenStreetMap is always changing. The way that mappers want to map features and enter that data, the tags that they want to use. Sure, some of the main ones stick around, but when you start getting into the more interesting tags and interesting features, all of a sudden they can decide: hey, this is a new tag for this, or we’re going to map it in a different way. And so you do need to keep on top of those changes as well. And that’s a key bit of value add that businesses can make on top of OpenStreetMap, is keeping up with those kinds of changes.

Ed: Well, this is for us, one of the, and it must be similar in your business, one of the big challenges that many people underestimate is they think, “Oh, I just need to set it up”. But actually OpenStreetMap is kind of a living beast, right? And the data is changing at such a rapid rate and new things are constantly coming out and it can be a real operational challenge just to keep everything running.

Andy: It’s a challenge. It’s okay when this is what you’re concentrating on. Where I see it, is other businesses who aren’t really focused on OpenStreetMap, they maybe set something once, they expect it to remain the same for a long time and you can see their maps start to degrade. Or they just make mistakes. Simple mistakes like assuming that the highway tag is for roads, but it also includes loads of other stuff as well. So sometimes you can see a company that has set up their own OpenStreetMap stuff and it’s like, yeah, I can see where you were going with that, but you didn’t really know the details. But for folk who are running businesses that are based on OpenStreetMap, we’re immersed in this kind of stuff. So when the changes happen, we just roll it out and move on.

Ed: Yeah. Well, let’s continue on this theme because as someone who’s been in the OpenStreetMap community for a long time, over the last couple of years we’ve seen more and more big players kind of enter the community in different ways. I mean the great example is Facebook is now doing a lot in OpenStreetMap, not always with the smoothest relationship with the existing community. As someone who operates a small business, how do you see that dynamic and is that an opportunity for OpenStreetMap, a threat? Is it both? What’s your perspective?

Andy: Well from the small business perspective then it’s all good news because these big companies that are coming in, like your Facebooks, I know the Apple uses OpenStreetMap data as well. They’re not competing against my business. They’re off doing their own thing. What they do bring in is some expertise and to OpenStreetMap some conflict as well, as you say. But the more that OpenStreetMap gets used, the more places in the world get mapped, the better it is for everybody who’s using OpenStreetMap. Because it’s one of the things I’ve noticed in the last four or five years, is, the most common question from prospective customers has just changed. When I started this business it was always “Where is OpenStreetMap complete?”, “Is OpenStreetMap ever going to be complete?”, “What about Germany?”, “How does it work in this country or that country?” So those questions have ended now. Like, people just know OpenStreetMap, they know that it’s big, it’s used by big companies, it’s fine. And that’s been a real boost to small businesses working with OpenStreetMap. So some of that is just time passes and OpenStreetMap continues to be successful. Some of it is boosted by these big players coming in and helping out with some of the mapping.

Ed: Yeah. What’s your perspective on a lot of these big players? Again, Facebook being an example, a lot of the mapping now is, let’s say, assisted by technology, be that image analysis of satellite images or whatever. How do you view that as someone who got started in the very, very early days? I mean, I think you were one of the first handful of OpenStreetMap contributors weren’t you? Like, riding around on your bike and with your GPS device?

Andy: Yeah, it was more than a handful when I was there, but yeah, certainly that’s how I started, riding around with a GPS. We didn’t have aerial imagery, all that kind of stuff. So my view on getting the external help is, so long as it’s providing tools to help regular mappers, I’m all for it. If you’re trying to bypass regular mappers and stuff data straight into OpenStreetMap then no, I don’t like that approach. And actually yesterday somebody linked to a blog post that I had written 11 years ago on this topic. I looked back slightly carefully going, you know, what were my views like back then? But actually it turns out they haven’t changed much in 11 years and I was still on that same track. So, if you build a tool that integrates with iD or JOSM or any of the other OpenStreetMap editors and it suggests changes or helps with another background layer or some kind of way to enable mappers and to make individual contributors more powerful… Yeah, I’m all for that.

Ed: Let’s switch tacks a little bit Andy. Because, you know, since you left the UK, it’s been a while since we’ve had you at a Geomob. But when you were a regular attendee, one of your, you know, we would often have startups come, or people come with their ideas and you would often kind of lead the questioning around the business model and how will this ever become a business. So, tell us a little bit more about the business side of your business. What’s your pricing model? How does it, how does that work?

Andy: Yeah. So I always have fun at Geomob with that question. But it’s a question that I reserve only for the right opportunities. Cause there’s loads of stuff that we see at Geomob, which is like, “Hey, I’m having fun, I’ve done this cool thing, look at my cool thing”. And I never asked them, what’s the business model? Cause if it’s, if it’s a cool thing, if it doesn’t need a business model, that’s fine. But when people come in and they haven’t really thought through what their business model is and it’s like, “Hey, we’ve got a team of people, we’re doing this professionally, we’re planning on making a business out of it but we’re just going to give everything away for free and work out what the business model is later”. Then, that always rings a little alarm bells for me because I’ve been there, I’ve done that. I’ve worked for a big VC backed startup where we just give stuff away for free and hoped it all worked out in the end. And it didn’t all work out in the end. So, I don’t want to see people making those same mistakes. And that’s the key bit about my business model. So I run a small business. I don’t run a startup. I don’t have funding, it’s all bootstrapped. Which means I need real customers who are going to pay money every month to my company. So I solve a problem, they pay me money, fairly straightforward business model. No kind of crazy advertising, nickels on the dollar, or anything like that. Just provide a good service and they pay. And the specific business model is a request based model. So we’ve got multiple different APIs. The developers, our customers, who use our APIs - whenever they make request to our service, we count them up. And that’s how much you pay every month. So we have a few tiers to keep the billing nice and straightforward. And yeah, that’s what people sign up to.

Ed: But do you ever get push back on that? Because sometimes people say, “Oh well, you know, I heard OpenStreetMap was free. Why should I have to pay?” We occasionally do get people with that type of attitude and that, I try to explain, “Oh well we’re providing a service and yes the data is free, but you know, we still have to keep the servers running”. Do you ever get that and how have you seen that change over time?

Andy: I don’t get it that much. I have a free tier available and so a lot of people use the free tier. I don’t know, maybe there’s just something around the wording on the website that that means people expect that they’re going to have to pay for it. I do have people who quite often question the pricing because perhaps they don’t feel it’s value for money. And in every case when you dig into it, it turns out that their budget is about $10 or maybe $20 a month. Those customers, for a small business, those customers are just not worth chasing. Like, it’s great if somebody wants to come in and spend some money, you know, that’s no problem. But for small businesses, you have to aim for customers who are going to pay a decent amount of money because you don’t have an unlimited support team. You can’t answer a thousand support requests a day. So you don’t want a thousand customers each of whom are only giving you $5 a month.

Ed: Well, yeah, it’s perverse. It’s almost the less they pay, the more support they require, in our experience.

Andy: Yeah, and that’s my experience with people as well who question the value, is they tend to then have lots of other questions and want lots of help. The customers who come in and go “Love your pricing model. It seems very reasonable for what you’re offering, I signed up yesterday”, then those are the customers you want. Like, they’re happy, they can see the value in the support, and things like that. And they are not trading off on the, “Hey, maybe I could do it myself” or “I found these random guys who set up shop six months ago and they were offering stuff free”. So there’s two sides to it. And as a small business, you want to focus on the people who are seeing the value in what you do.

Ed: Yeah. Are you typically getting people who are coming to you because of the aesthetics of the map or because it’s OpenStreetMap? Cause I know you’re quite well known in the OpenStreetMap community. What’s the dynamic there?

Andy: Listen it’s a mixture of things and I don’t have the most sophisticated kind of funnel tracking to figure out where people are coming from. A lot of it is the reputation of the maps that we’ve got already. We’ve been around for many years so people have heard of OpenCycleMap, have heard of our Transport map, they’ve heard of Outdoors. And so they know who to come to for that. Also because our maps are often quite a big part of what they see on other apps. So if they’re setting up a new business and they look at other competitors or similar fields, they can see these maps and they go right, where does this come from? So that makes it easier for me than for people like you because it’s not so obvious who’s powering the geocoding or who’s powering the routing. For the maps, it’s such a distinctive visual element that you can be like, “Oh, that’s an interesting looking map. Where does this come from?”

Ed: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. That is one challenge we face and I guess, your product does advertise itself in that regard. So, any advice for anyone out there thinking of starting a business based on OpenStreetMap?

Andy: Yeah, definitely. This is something I can stand in the pub for hours and chat about! The key thing is you first need to know who your customer is and focus on “customer”. Who’s going to pay you money for this. Cause there’s a million interesting things I can think of doing for OpenStreetMap, especially things that would be really useful for mapping and the mapping community. But with the best will in the world, they’re not going to pay you £100 a month or $100 a month to do this. I read an article many years ago which was really clear on this and it’s something I always recommend people to look up. It’s an analogy about what size of customer you want to aim for. And the analogy is, are you hunting rabbits, deer or elephants. And elephants are big companies like FTSE 100s or companies… basically they’re too big for a small business to aim for, especially for your first few customers. Rabbits are like end users, individual users, like people who sign up for Facebook or consumer services and there’s millions of them but they’re small and they are hard to catch and they escape really easily. And then deer are perfect for hunting. You got reasonable amount of food, they are reasonably easy to catch. You don’t need any specialist tools to get them and that’s definitely my advice for businesses is to go for primary customers are other small businesses. They have so many advantages. The best one is if you’re talking to somebody in a small business about your product and you’re trying to get them, to convince them. If you’re talking to the person who owns that company, who built it from scratch, has all the decision making authority, then you’re done. When they say, “Yeah, I’m going to sign up”, then they just sign up. They put their card information in and that’s the end of it. If you’re going after big enterprises, you can spend months going through their procurement division, or especially one of my customers has a separate company that screens their suppliers for them, and that’s just a whole lot of hassle.

Ed: Yeah. I can attest precisely to what you’re saying. We have the challenge, and maybe it’s similar for you, is that very often we get kind of discovered by the software developers at a company and they start using it and they like it and then they say, okay, now the projects going forward, like it’s time to, you know, we need to increase the volume, we want to become a customer. And then at that point you’ve got to deal with the person who can actually make the decision and pay the money and Oh man, it can be a pain.

Andy: Definitely. So that’s a key bit of building a business in front of OpenStreetMap instead of just doing something cool with OpenStreetMap. So if you’re, if you’re clear on your customer. It also helps define what you want your product to be as well. It needs to be like, like you said, we’re both in the same industry. We’ve got something that’s useful for developers, but then sometimes they’re not people who choose to spend the money. And if you’ve got that clear in your head, then it really helps with things like website design and the messaging and the different audience that you’re talking to on different parts of the website. So like API documentation, it can be written quite distinctly from the, “Hey, sign up, we’re a …”, you know, answering the questions that the purchasing manager has.

Ed: Yeah. There’s a real art to it, to navigating that and getting the right tone on the right page, in front of the right audience.

Andy: Oh yeah. And this is again where being clear on what kind of company you are chasing can help. Because I’ve come across places where developers are using our services, the payment teams are coming in and starting to cause too much trouble, and sometimes just like, it’s fine to walk away from that and say, “I’m not betting my business on needing this one customer deal to succeed”. And it takes a lot of pressure off. If I only had three large businesses as my customers, then a whole lot is invested in trying to navigate their internal bureaucracy, and that can be a complete nightmare.

Ed: I agree. You’re preaching to the choir as someone who has had to navigate that very path. It can be a nightmare. All right. So what’s next for Thunderforest? What does the future hold for you?

Andy: Well, there’s a whole lot of interesting technical things, but I’ll leave that for offline. We’ve got some more map styles and some more APIs coming up. The big thing for Thunderforest is trying to maintain the edge on technology. So a lot of stuff is moving towards vector tiles, it’s not the solution for everything. But we have our Vector Tiles APIs available. We’re working on that. We’ve had two releases of new vector tilesets in the last 12 months.

Ed: Andy, before we go further, maybe just for the benefit of this audience, what are vector tiles? Very quickly break this down, just want to make sure everyone’s aware, cause it’s one of the key technological changes I think going on right now.

Andy: Yeah, sure. So most people will be more familiar with raster tiles or normal image tiles, which is when you look at a map, what gets sent to you over the internet is premade small square pictures and sometimes, especially if you’re on a slow connection, you can see those pictures popping up on your screen. They’re great, they fit a whole load of use cases. But there’s a few edge cases where having the images already made before you send them over the wire isn’t the best option. So vector tiles are a different way of achieving the same maps, but where you send the raw data over the internet and either your phone or your web browser colour in the maps for you. So that means you can do some interesting things involving having different map styles without having to fetch more data over the network. It can work well for offline use cases and slow connections where, depending on your application, sometimes it’s quicker to pull the raw data over and draw the maps locally, than it is to fetch the pre-rendered maps.

Ed: Okay. Excellent summary. So, you say you’re moving, everything’s moving much more towards the vector.

Andy: Yeah, so we’ve been using them behind the scenes for years, now. All of our raster maps that we provide are actually being created using vector tiles behind the scenes. But the problem with the vector tiles, or one of the main downsides, is they need a lot more CPU power, a lot more processing power on the devices to draw. And it just wasn’t feasible 10 years ago to be doing this. As everything gets more powerful, more and more people are doing them online. So we’re seeing more of our customers taking the vector tiles from us, and doing onboard rendering. So that’s where we’re focusing a lot of our development effort, on making this easier for people to get started with, whilst still keeping our our edge on the custom map styles and all the interesting things we’ve done before.

Ed: Well, sounds good. Congrats on how far you’ve come and I look forward to all the future map styles. I’m sure there’ll be cool. Hopefully, obviously you’re always welcome to come speak at a Geomob anytime to tell us about your progress.

Andy: Yeah, thank you.

Ed: Our traditional closing question, as we kind of wrap up here. Looking back as a long time attendee, any favourite Geomob talks that stood out for you?

Andy: I mean, this is a really hard question because I’ve been doing Geomob since the start. So, I’ve missed the last a year or two, but there’s hundreds, there must be hundreds of talks that I’ve been to. The one that immediately sticks out in my mind though was one a few years ago from Anna Powell-Smith who was talking about land ownership and property ownership in the UK, and using different data sets, different open data, in order to investigate how much property and how much land was being owned by offshore companies. I really liked that because immediately, I think even whilst she was still talking, I was on the website that she was talking about and looking at my local area and finding houses within a few hundred meters of where I live that were owned by shady offshore British Virgin Islands companies. And I thought that was really interesting.

Ed: Yeah, great. That was a great project and also a great presentation that she gave and she won the best speaker prize. But also, you know, I’ve seen it cited numerous times, in media and I think it’s become a tool that a lot of people are using to try to understand the situation better. So good choice.

Andy: Yeah, and I think it’s a great story around open data and open government data as well, which I think, it’s really important to have those stories. And to tell the stories well.

Ed: It’s interesting, you’re the second person actually to mention her. Steven Feldman also mentioned her talk in an early episode, so we’ll have to get her on the podcast here and get her to talk about it in more detail. OK Andy, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you and about Thunderforest? How can they get in touch?

Andy: For Thunderforest, thunderforest.com has all the details. If you’ve got any questions, there’s a link on that site. Just send us an email and we can answer your questions. For my personal stuff, I think Twitter is probably the best place to see what I’m looking at and what I’m thinking about it, and I’m gravitystorm on Twitter.

Ed: Excellent Andy, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Andy: You’re welcome.

Ed: Thanks everyone for joining us today and listening to the Geomob podcast. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the discussion. Please don’t hesitate if you have any feedback for us or any suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future. You can get the show notes over on the website, which is at thegeomob.com. While you’re there, if you’re not yet on the mailing list, please do get on the mailing list where we once a month send out an email announcing future events, summarizing past events and just generally sharing events that you may find of interest. You can also of course follow us on Twitter where our handle is geomob. You can follow Steven at stephenfeldman. You can follow me at freyfogle. You can check out Mappery at mappery.org and of course if you need any geocoding, please check out my service, which is opencagedata.com. We look forward to you joining us again at a future episode, and of course seeing you at a future Geomob event. Hope to see you there soon. Bye.

New Vector Tileset - thunderforest.transport-v2

2020-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

I’m pleased to announce that the thunderforest.transport-v2 vector tileset is now available, and is a recommended upgrade for everyone who has been using our thunderforest.transport-v1 vector tileset.

In this release, notable additions include adding aerialway information, so you can show chairlifts, gondolas and cable cars on your maps. These are often used as transport in ski areas, but are also used elsewhere for public transport like in Medellín, Colombia. We’ve added details to the airport labels, so that you can show the name along with the 3-letter IATA code, like LHR for London Heathrow and SFO for San Francisco. For really detailed aviation styles, we also have the four-letter ICAO codes available too (like EGLL or KSFO). There’s more information available for different classifications of railways, and improved positioning information for railway platform labels. We’ve added more details to the wetland layer, more types of boundaries to the admin layer, and more details used for harbours and ports to the water-feature layer.

Not just for skiers - the Metrocable system in Medellín.

The rest of the changes are mostly of an incremental nature, and are aimed at making it easier to build map styles using our vector tiles. For example, we’ve switched to using ocean polygons instead of land polygons. This works better in some cartographic edge-cases, and it’s also what we already use in the thunderforest.outdoors-v2 vector tileset, so it’s nice to be consistent for people using both tilesets. Many of the layers have been renamed, again to improve consistency, such as standardising on singular layer names, use -label suffixes instead of -text, and making the layer names easier to understand (like renaming ne-10m-admin-1-lines to state-line)! Further simplifications have been gained by combining similar layers, so we now have only one layer for place labels, and one layer for railway stations, since the legacy reasons for having multiple layers are no longer necessary.

Behind the scenes, the whole technology stack that creates the thunderforest.transport-v2 tileset has been completely updated, with new versions of the underlying database, new update processing, updated software used to generate the vector tiles, and it also uses the latest version of the vector tiles specification. So I’m very happy with the results of this project, and I look forward to hearing what you think too.

Full documentation for this tileset and for our Vector Sources API are available. If you haven’t done so already you can sign up for your Thunderforest account today - and if your project doesn’t currently need vector tiles, then check out our Map Tiles API for our high-performance pre-rendered map options.

New Vector Tileset - thunderforest.outdoors-v2

2019-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Last August, we quietly started using our new thunderforest.outdoors-v2 vector tileset as part of the production process behind our Map Tiles API. We started with our Outdoors map and rolled out the upgrade across our different maps, one at a time. Yet even though the new vector tileset had proven itself in production, there were still a few bits and pieces that I wanted to rework before announcing the release, and some documentation that I’d not quite finished off - so this announcement is a little later than planned! However, at long last, I’m pleased to announce that the thunderforest.outdoors-v2 vector tileset is now available for everyone to use!

As I mentioned last time, this update ended up being much larger than I originally intended, and so it brings a wide range of notable improvements. Highlights include better elevation and shading layers (more on them in a future post), more points of interest, simplified landuse and landcover polygons, higher performance roads layers and improved multi-lingual labelling support. We’ve added addressing information, combined similar layers for easier style development, and added dozens of other new features.

Over the last few months we’ve also been working on significant performance optimisations for on-device rendering, which have drastically cut the size and complexity of these vector tiles. This has made a big impact for rendering on mobile devices, where the smaller vector tile sizes and changes to the detailed feature layout now leads to a smoother rendering experience, particularly on older devices. We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that simplification of features is more than just filtering on size - for example, with lakes or forests you don’t see individual polygons suddenly pop into view when crossing an arbitrary size threshold. Given our relentless focus on cartographic quality, these simplifications were developed with a close eye on the visual details. So no oversimplifications or weird looking polygons; we retained our great looking topography; and our vector tiles still contain all the features and attributes needed for the detailed cartography for which we’re recognised.

I’ll go into more details about this update in future posts, but for now you can review the documentation for this tileset and for our Vector Sources API in general. If you haven’t done so already you can sign up for your Thunderforest account today - and if vector tiles are not your cup of tea, check out our Map Tiles API for our high-performance pre-rendered map images.

Updates for our Vector Maps API

2017-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

It’s been a busy year here at Thunderforest HQ. We rolled out our API Keys to all of our existing customers, which was a time-consuming-but-necessary task. We’ve also finished a range of software upgrades and infrastructure work, and running a growing and profitable small business doesn’t leave much spare time each week. So while it might have seemed quiet from our blog, there’s been a lot of work going on!

Towards the end of 2017 my focus has returned to technical work on our vector tiles. I initially created these in order to power our own in-house styles, as well as making it easier to create custom map styles for our customers. They’ve proven their worth over the last few years for our internal needs, but our vector tiles are increasing being used by our customers over-the-air, with the final rendering happening on client devices. One example is the Bike Hub Cycle Journey planner iOS app, which renders our vector tiles with a custom style, in addition to our regular map tiles.

With this in mind, I’ve been redesigning some aspects of our vector tilesets to make life easier for on-device rendering. As an example, in our first generation tilesets we have a separate layers for oceans at low zoom levels. Since this is just an artefact of how the maps were generated years ago, it makes sense now to revisit and combine the two ocean layers into one. Similarly, we’ve revisited how our contour lines are generated, and combined them with the layer used for elevation colouring. And there’s a whole list of additional points of interest, landuse types, boundaries and road and path attributes that I’m adding, based both on requests from our customers, and also features that I want to add to our own in-house maps. On reflection, I’ve been overly ambitious with my wish-list for the next release, and I could have broken down the project into a couple of smaller releases. But we’re getting very close now and it’ll all be worth it!

In the meantime, our first-generation vector tilesets are available for immediate use - served from the same high-performance infrastructure as all of our other maps. Sign up for your Thunderforest account today to get started.

Our New Static Maps API

2016-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

At long last, we’re happy to announce that our Static Maps API is now available for all our customers!

The Static Maps API allows you to choose the exact position and dimensions of a single map image. It’s a great solution when you aren’t looking for an interactive tiles-based map, and avoids the need to join and crop individual map images by hand to make a single image.

We developed the API over a year ago for one of our customers, who asked if we could put it together for their interactive gaming project. We’ve since had further enquiries, and we’ve been using it internally for a range of projects too. But it’s taken a surprisingly long time for me to put the documentation together, since we’ve been working on other projects too!

So if you’re looking for a simple way to get fixed map images from our services, then our Static Maps API is the answer. It’s available for immediate use, and works with all of our standard maps and our custom cartography too.

If you haven’t already done so, sign up for a Thunderforest account and get started!

API Keys are Now Available

2016-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

We’ve been trialling our new API Keys with our services for the last few months, and they are now available for all of our customers.

Simply sign in to your Thunderforest account, and you’ll see your API Keys on your dashboard. Add them to your Thunderforest URLs in your app or website configuration, and you’re all set. Our API Key documentation has the full details.

Background

So why are we introducing API Keys, and why now? For years we’ve tracked requests by using the HTTP Referer and User-Agent headers, along with other information such as IP addresses. This has worked well, but more recently we’ve found situations where this doesn’t work as well as we’d like. Some toolkits make it hard to set unique User-Agents headers. New privacy policies can make the Referers less reliable. For some of our newer server-to-server APIs, those headers are often missing by default, and we want to avoid jumping through hoops to get started. Some customers want to use our services on hundreds of their websites, and that becomes unwieldy - they would otherwise need to contact us every time they add a new site. API Keys are therefore a useful way for customers to identify their traffic to us, and helps cut down the paperwork for everyone.

The Future

As our business has been growing rapidly, and the manual tracking has become more cumbersome, we will be enforcing API Keys in early 2017. So it’s worth updating your apps and website configurations to use API Keys in your next release.

We’re also further developing our request tracking system to integrate it into our website. This will bring you real-time information on your quota usage, and other useful information on your requests. In addition to our map tiles service, your API Keys will get you access to our other new and upcoming services.

Getting Started

If you’re already using API Keys in your apps or on your website, then there’s nothing you need to do!

If you’ve been using Thunderforest maps and haven’t got an account with us yet, please sign up to get your API Keys today.

If you have any questions about API Keys our support team is ready to help.