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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

First impression was pretty bad. Tried to get a route from my place to my parent's house a couple cities south, and it took a lot of fiddling with the string to get it to understand where I live. Didn't have any trouble finding my parent's home, but once I got both in the instructions it gave were pretty poor: http://a.pomf.se/msawni.png

I really want OSM to be good for this sort of thing, so I'll probably end up poking around and fixing the errors that led to this mess.

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Essentially this is a GIGO issue. If you ask for a route between any two places in the UK, or Germany, or France, or any other country with a strong OSM community, OSM will do fine - in fact, by bike or on foot, you'll get a better route than Google would give you.

We don't have as strong a community in the US. In SF, NYC etc. the data's pretty good. In rural Nevada it... isn't. It's still raw untouched TIGER (US census data) in most places.

So: hell yes, poke around and fix it. We would love OSM to be as good in the US as it is in Europe. And if anything isn't clear, pop in here or on IRC and ask. We're a friendly community.

I've found it to be pretty hit-and-miss. For example, it doesn't know where my house is, either, but it knows where my old apartment is (in the same town), and where the houses of several relatives are in other cities.

It's probably issues with OSM's data rather than the routing mechanism itself, however, so yeah, it should be possible to poke at it a bit and fix things up (as I likely will do, being no stranger to OSM editing myself).

Try inputting your address without any sort of "area" or suburb. I.e. just type in street number + street name + city. I had such a tough time wondering why it wouldn't recognize a certain address, then noticed how it auto-corrected the previous one that worked.

Instead of picking up that the address was in suburb "A", it put it inside "Ward 47 of Tshwane", Tshwane being the city/municipality. Perhaps the data for suburbs is not up to scratch in my particular area.

In all my testing, it was with only the number and street name (i.e. "1234 Somesuch Road") - no city, state, zip, etc. I tried again with "1234 Somesuch Road Somecity" ("Somecity" being the city) for my own town, but that didn't seem to work, either.

We'd love for you to get involved and help improve the map :)

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