2013 OpenStreetMap Data Report

This year for State of the Map we look at the last eight years of OpenStreetMap's growth and change.

Founded in 2004, OpenStreetMap has grown from a local project to a worldwide map with widespread use and high data quality.

Visualizing road updates

All roads in the continental United States, shaded by how recently they've been updated by users. Older imports to North America are in green and blue, while cities with strong and active communities and the effect of recent automated editing makes areas glow red.

Adding buildings to Chicago, Illinois

In Chicago, Ian Dees led an import of building data from the city government that both improved addressing to locations in the city and made the map more useful. See OpenStreetMap's excellent new coverage in Chicago.

Before
After

Updating road names

Serge Wroclawski's bot-mode automated editor swept through the United States in late 2012 and early 2013 to expand imported, shortened road names into their full versions.

bot-mode

Over 1,000,000 users

On January 6, 2013, OpenStreetMap crossed the 1 million users mark, and continues to grow, both in terms of data and active userbase.

Like most internet projects, a majority of users are casual or inactive, with a small minority contributing the majority of additions and corrections to the map.

Abundance of data

OpenStreetMap's dataset has grown to unprecedented size, thanks to volunteers at home, imports, and targeted efforts to improve data quality in important areas. The database now contains over 21 million miles of road data and 78 million buildings.

OpenStreetMap has...

21,107,196 miles (33,968,739 km)
worth of road data.
That's 93.17 trips to the moon...
847.63 orbits of Earth...
or 40.13 years driving at 60mph.

Densely mapped data

Some areas of OpenStreetMap reach incredible points of data density, including every tree, precise details about houses and alleys, and much more. Frederick Ramm compiled a list of the top 208 most densely mapped areas of the world, which are often in France, the US, and Cameroon.

Updating every second

OpenStreetMap is constantly improved in real time by thousands of volunteers around the world. Here's what they're doing now.

OpenStreetMap changes every minute, and more than 1,000 new mappers contribute every day.

All of this from a project that started from scratch in 2004. Want to make it even better?

Start Mapping
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