As you might know, as of this week, Juno is no more. It is ceased to be. We had a good run, helped thousand of NYC drivers earn money and provided them with a human, attentive support team. But the increasing regulations in the city benefited Uber and disadvantaged their competitors, especially small companies like Juno. So we decided not to continue this fight.

What happens to the GPS tile layer we were making? It is still there — but not updating anymore. I have loaded two days worth of tracks for the central part, and month for the rest. It should help validate some of the complex cases around the edges, but obviously won’t tell you what has changed in recent days. Sorry for not updating it, and I hope it still helps with mapping New York.

In the meantime we have published another open-source thing: a reverse geocoder. In fact, it seems like the first ready to use, open and strictly reverse geocoder. Unlike others, it is in no way optimized for forward geocoding, but does one thing better than the others: finding an address for a coordinate. You can learn more about why it is not an easy task from my SotM lightning talk. And head to the github repository to see the queries and test cases for yourself:

https://github.com/gojuno/jrg

The moment Juno was over, the whole R&D team, me included, was acquired by Lyft. Which means, instead of asking others to open more data for OSM and to help the community with improving the map, I get to do that myself. Just for the US though, but still better than NYC only. I’m pretty excited for this new opportunity, and looking forward to working with their mapping team and their data — and making OpenStreetMap useful and better for everyone.