OpenStreetMap
As a bloody OSM newbie I quickly realized, the strength of this crowdsourced project is not (only) freely available geometries, but the database in the background. As far as I’m aware, OSM is quite influencal in the mapping business and we may take our chances for pioneering tasks.
With the last OSM carto release (v2.30.0), bicycle_parking has been finally made available for display by default on the main map. Great! But why omitting charging stations? (such as this here) Those are not even available on the cycling layer, why? This is something I really, really would love to see added sooner than later! Cities want to get rid of cars, there are lots of efforts/incentives around the world to achieve this. E-bikes are quite a thing by now - but I can imagine people fear the lack of appropriate charging stations (same applies to car charging stations).
Here in Vienna alone are around 300 charging stations available - why not show people: hey, go ahead, get your E-bike…there are plenty of charging stations around you! This wouldn’t congest the map by no means, but would be really far-sighted in terms of social responsibility. At least, this should be added to the cycling layer. (I’m aware of things suchs as Overpass API for creating own specialized maps…but I think this might be of general interest)
However, as I’m new here, I have no idea how to address/forward such suggestions to persons in charge - but I hope this is also on the agenda for future updates!
Discussion
Comment from imagico on 23 May 2015 at 11:13
See:
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/989
Note however the practical usefulness is right now fairly hypothetical. If you have an electric vehicle right now the chances that when you go to one of the places tagged amenity=charging_station in OSM with it you can actually charge it there are probably slim - just have a look at the number of sockets shown on the wiki page - not to mention the contractual difficulties of being allowed to use it. Electric charging is still lightyears away from fossile fuel ‘charging’ where you can usually be sure that you can (a) technically fuel your vehicle and (b) pay with at least either cash or credit card at any fuel station.
Comment from Warin61 on 24 May 2015 at 00:35
1) Rendering to ‘the map’? There are various OSM maps .. some of them bicycle specific .. and some of those at least have shown bicycle parking for some time. It is not possible for one map to show all that OSM has.
2) “Charging Stations” .. may be taken as not vehicle specific. There is discussion on this within the tagging group. It may progress to being used for ‘charging stations’ for laptops/phones in airports… Access to these ‘stations’ may be stated using the access tag. Payment methods are available by the fee tag.
I’d like to see ‘motor vehicle charging stations’ and ‘bicycle charging stations’ as separate tags. They have different on the ground appearance and different requirements.