How Lyft Discovered OpenStreetMap is the Freshest Map for Rideshare
An Anonymous Coward writes:
How Lyft discovered OpenStreetMap is the Freshest Map for Rideshare:
Lyft moves people - from home to work, work to play, play to rest, through cities and beyond. Maps play a critical role, helping Lyft figure out where drivers and riders are, how best to connect them, and estimate how long it will take to get to the destination.
Lyft Mapping is built on top of OpenStreetMap. This global map database is used by millions of people around the world, for combatting climate change, tracking agricultural land use, disaster recovery, refugee response, academic research, and much more. After 16 years of growth, OSM is now commonly used by many companies to power applications like logistics platforms, social media, and gaming. OSM is now the biggest crowdsourced repository of human geospatial knowledge. But is this map suitable for supporting the rideshare experience? Is it the best option available? Can Lyft support the OSM community and contribute to making the map better? Though we had a strong intuition that OSM offered a complete road network, we didn't know how well the map matched the real world - so we ran a study.
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