weeklyOSM 827

21/05/2026-27/05/2026

[1] Several animal-related infrastructure features | © imagico | map data © by OpenStreetMap Contributors.

Community

• Ari Alvarez explained how to find speed limit data for highways, trunk roads, and primary roads in the USA.
• Raquel Dezidério Souto published on her OSM User Diary, an article entitled "About us": two years of experience as editor for Brazilian Portuguese at weeklyOSM, some highlights from this period , with part of the news published in weeklyOSM over the past two years, to celebrate her second anniversary of editing this language. She thanks her colleagues: Thayná Assis, Adriele Bernardo, Lívia Rios (ex members), and the actual co-editors: Paloma Moreira, Amanda Silva, Matheus Magalhães, Vitor Sousa, and Francisco Theodoro.
• Lux Schuss noted that there are several issues with the walk=no tag.
• The Unique Mappers Network participated in the volunteer orientation training for the Port Harcourt Tech Expo 2026, in preparation for the upcoming event. During the expo the organisation is set to contribute through digital mapping activities and demonstrations of the OpenStreetMap platform.
• Christoph Hormann shared a curated selection of reference materials regarding the FOSSGIS membership fee structure, offering a transparent look into the association’s own perspective on the issue.
• Anne-Karoline Distel would like to write a tutorial on mapping ‘lifting stones’. Her OSM diary contains more about her ideas and some open questions.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSMF Moderation Team has posted its fourth annual report to the OSMF website. The Team moderates the talk and osmf-talk lists plus three channels on the OSM Community forum (general, general:tagging, and foundation).

Local chapter news

• Katja Haferkorn and Oliver Rudzick reported ► that 33 active members of the German-speaking OpenStreetMap and FOSSGIS communities gathered ► in Essen for the FOSSGIS-OSM Community Meeting, held from 30 April to 3 May. The next FOSSGIS-OSM Community Meeting is scheduled to take place from 2 to 4 October 2026.
• The Panoramax instance hosted by OSM-France is celebrating its third anniversary. With 50 million photos already published, it is becoming a victim of its own success and will soon reach its current storage limit. That is why the association is calling for donations to increase its storage capacity and purchase GPUs to provide a better photo blurring service.
• What began as a personal fresh start with OSM whilst on holiday gradually developed into a revival of the OpenStreetMap community in Fulda, Germany. A user story for you to read.

Events

• State of the Map Baltics 2026 will be held at the University of Latvia on 4 June as part of the Baltic Geospatial Information Technology Conference 2026.

Maps

• [1] Christoph Hormann has added several animal-related infrastructure features to the OSM-Carto alternative colours map style.
• Leni_v has launched urbanistmap.org, a web platform that tracks urban projects worldwide by showing all OpenStreetMap data tagged as proposed, planned, or under construction.
• leekyuhaiambox-ops reported that the ‘geoinformatic‘ application, hosted on PythonAnywhere, utilises OpenStreetMap data to assess neighbourhoods based on accessibility to key amenities. The platform conducts a multi-facility analysis by calculating the reachability of various services, including schools, hospitals, markets, parks, gyms, pharmacies, libraries, and cafés, to help users evaluate potential places to live.

OSM in action

• vic-tor-menta tooted that Erin Brockovich has set up a website where people can report planned data centres in the US to coordinate resistance movements. A map with an OSM background shows data centres that are already in operation and those that have been reported by the public. In France, there is a similar map showing existing data centres from OSM, created ► by ‘Le nuage était sous nos pieds’ (The cloud was under our feet).

Open Data

• Tobias reported that the Panoramax project has developed an AI model capable of recognising German traffic signs from street-level imagery.

Software

• The Bike Streets team developed a new tool that automatically determines whether changes to OpenStreetMap data could potentially affect Bike Streets maps.
• Altilunium has built ‘Terjangkau: Neighborhood Explorer’, a map-based tool designed to help users discover, categorise, and measure distances to neighbourhood facilities and points of interest within a one-kilometre radius of any selected location. Powered by OpenStreetMap data, the platform enables interactive exploration of nearby amenities based on clicked map coordinates.
• Open Energy Transition and MapYourGrid have developed Grid2Poster, an app that generates print-ready posters of electrical transmission grids using data from OpenStreetMap.
• HeiGIT released an application that calculates pedestrian routes based on high-resolution shadow data, steering people through shaded corridors and away from sun-exposed roads. The routing itself runs on openrouteservice, HeiGIT’s open-source routing engine, with OpenStreetMap road geometries as the underlying road network.

Programming

• Manbhav Sugla has been selected for the 2026 Google Summer of Code to develop support for a DuckDB backend in Martin TileServer. As part of the project, Sugla will also publish diary entries documenting the development progress.

Releases

• Bikerouter has launched version 2026.13, introducing a ‘Route Inspector’ tool that enables users to view information about the route and its segments directly on the map.
• OSRM-frontend version 0.5.0 has been released, introducing several new features and bug fixes.
• Rphyrin has released Altilunium LocationPad v26.5.22, introducing support for long-form place descriptions. This update allows users to store extended paragraphs about locations within this personal geographical knowledge base.

OSM in the media

• The Seoul Economic Daily reported ► that the Chungnam Culture and Tourism Foundation held a cycling tour, in conjunction with a train trip, on 16 and 17 May. The ride route map distributed by the foundation used OSM as the background map, but unfortunately it is not attributed.

Other “geo” things

• Jonn Elledge explained how difficult it is to properly measure the length of a river.
• Time reported that Iran is threatening to charge annual fees for fibre-optic cables running beneath the Strait of Hormuz, putting several submarine cable systems at risk, including Asia-Africa-Europe 1 and Southeast Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 5. Experts warned that Southeast Asian hubs could experience severe latency spikes when communicating with European hubs.

Upcoming Events

Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Raquel IVIDES DATA, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred, izen57, s8321414. We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.