I’m happy to announce that my company, DoubleMap which does GPS bus tracking, has switched all of our public web maps away from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap, with tiles rendered and served by MapBox.

Tens of thousands of transit riders across the US and internationally use DoubleMap’s GPS tracking to help them find out where the bus is at that exact second. Our public map is one of our main features, so the switch to OSM-based maps wasn’t a light decision.

The whole big write-up can be found on the DoubleMap engineering blog but overall it was a great experience.

TM2

We really took advantage of MapBox’s experimental TM2 map styler, since it would have been too much work for us to download and render all the coverage we needed. Instead of uploading gigs of map tiles, we just uploaded a compiled style to MapBox and everything else was taken care of.

Future work

As a company, we’re interested in possibly using OSM data for geocoding, reverse geocoding, routing, and more. We’re definitely happy to see MapBox offer its new routing API, and there may be things that we can do as a company (e.g. collect data and/or feedback for our clients’ cities) to improve OSM data as well.

Check out one of our live GPS bus-tracking maps!

Full article: Porting 600k map views to OpenStreetMap/MapBox