When I started at OSM in the Chiemsee area, there was only a big blue line, the A8, and the outline of the Chiemsee. What a difference now!

Today I use OSM to plan new routes, but still I find a lot of work, the tracks in the mountains all need to be checked, some are not accurate or even wrong, so basically it may be a bit risky to follow OSM there at the moment. I think the main reason for the sometimes insufficient accuracy is that most gps devices tend to go terribly wrong when the visible sky area is only small. Thanks to Microsoft's Bing maps we now can fix many of those small issues, but what is more important, all the tracks need to be checked "in situ", meaning still a lot work in the field necessary, and basically that is what makes the fun of Openstreetmap. Another issue still is the mapping of the many, many villages of our area, it seems most are in the map, but many residential streets, paths and trackways still need to be tracked and mapped, not speaking of any house numbers and the never ending story of POIs.

Today Openstreetmap in many areas is far more accurate and recent than all commercial materials I know, not mentioning some nasty easter eggs and quite a few mistakes in these maps. It's a weird kind of fun to see a long queue of cars rolling down a dirt road which in fact is closed for motor cars, partly getting stuck on the small bridges ... and no way to turn around, just because a well known software suggested it as a detour, or another one trying to lead me to the wrong side of a highway access. I am pretty sure at the moment with OSM we would get similar results in many cases, but this would be the next step in my eyes: make OSM routeable, fix all these small issues, get all the house numbers in, and I am sure in 1 or 2 years there would be no better routing map than Openstreetmap.

dkj

If I remember right I was almost the first in the Chiemsee area to join openstreetmap. I did a lot in 2007 and parts of 2008, but then I needed to stop. Now I am back. I found so many people here now are tracking and the map and database have improved a lot.

I began tracking again in the Irschenberg area, where still lots of small and roads and hamlets are missing, and as soon as the weather improves I will jump on my bike and begin tracking all those hundreds of residential roads still missing in the map of the Chiemsee area. Also I found that the street names in Trostberg still are missing, while the map itself seems to be almost complete now.