Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Looks like The Netherlands is one of the most dense countries in the world. I wonder why that is, we (speaking as a Dutch person) hardly seem to use OSM while in Germany it's very popular.

One explanation is the recent addition of the government's address and building data, which gives us close to perfect outlines for every building in the country plus an extra node per address. Or we just have a high number of people per square kilometer regardless of the recent (now almost finished) data import.

Edit: Looks like it's simply our density in general and not this import; last year the Netherlands also stood out while we hadn't even imported 10% yet. From last year: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/tyr_asd/diary/19549

The buildings have a huge impact. Look at New York, Chicago or San Francisco. They also had building imports and they shine quite brightly.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/AND_Data ?

That and 3dshapes[1] helped a lot of course, but since we started importing BAG data in March the map size (looking at the OsmAnd map file) roughly doubled. Thought that might also influence this density map a lot but it doesn't seem so.

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/3dShapes

My guess is that this might be cycling related; that an area where there's likely to be public-spirited cyclists with GPS devices is well placed to get good OSM coverage.

In support of my theory, I point to Cambridge being a little bit of a hotspot in the southeast of England. (Not so much as Clacton though ... hmmm ... maybe the theory needs some work.)

Isn't Cambridge where OpenStreetMap started? That's a bit of a confounding factor!

"Isn't Cambridge where OpenStreetMap started?"

No. London.

Well, kinda. A lot of the coding and early work was done in Cambridge but the first node I think was in Regents Park.

I believe Cambridge was the first place to be declared "complete".

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