It was a dark and stormy night - no, not THAT dark and stormy night, but still a challenging situation! Imagine an emergency services reponder being tasked with rapidly finding a residence on an active call in an area of:

Appalachian Foothills with winding narrow roads

Rural dense / light suburban population density

Rainy spring / early summer leads to rapid landscape / vegetation growth, quickly obscuring mailbox location.

Tree covered and winding shared driveways several Km long - possibly lacking turnoff marking to individual houses. House is often not visible from the road.

Unmarked, unreadable, or non-reflective mailbox number markers.

Last year, this situation led the local Slater-Marietta Fire District (FD) to post not just one , but two pleas for people to pay attention to driveway entrance and house markings.

While the local OSM community was importing cell towers in a nearby county, one of the mappers who worked on cell towers at the time noted that driveways would be very useful because of similar problems: the tower might not be visible from the roadway, and no clear marking for the tiny access road would lead to the tower. That statement and seeing the “Amazon driveway project” come to our area gave me a project idea for that fire district: review all roads, create all driveways, and enter all addresses - then have the EMS use a standard OSM navigation app to get turn-by-turn directions to their destination.

A mapping colleague established a working relationship with the county - although they don’t have open data, they gave OSM permission and access to image layers for 6 inch off-leaf aerial imagery and roads and addresses. After opening up separate task manager tasks for roads and buildings , the area was eventually completed and ready for navigation.

BUT - finding apps that route up private driveways and past gates is a challenge. The standard OSM routers on the main page stop at private driveways. The BRouter web client was a useful tool to set up a custom routing profile and confirm that driveway navigation is effective. In apps, my choices were:

OSMAnd - excellent because immediate updates from OSM are possible. But the address search on the IOS version was ineffective. I wasn’t yet sure what equipment the local FD would be using, so I didn’t want to count on using OSMAnd.

Magic Earth - supports IOS and Android and calculates routes up private driveways. Looked like it would work, but can’t determine the data update rate. Also it’s not clear what the options “OSM Mode” and “Debug Mode” do. There’s an Email contact for support but no user forum.

Maps.me - supports IOS and Andoid and routes into private driveways, but data update is several months behind OSM. The data date is clearly shown in the app which is a help. Has ads unless paying to remove them.

A big plus for any of these apps is that the data can be pre-downloaded, and navigation will continue to work in isolated areas without cellular data coverage.

In the end, Magic Earth released a data update in late January and included the new data from the FD. We met with the FD and showed them Magic Earth. They were very enthusiastic about the app and tested it with some past problem addresses. They noted that one house has no driveway: you must know to park at the neighbor’s house and walk on a foot path through the woods to get there. OSM navigation would not be able to find that one! They loaded Magic Earth on the iPads mounted in the trucks. They also had a Windows tablet which we had no navigation solution for.

The fire district monitors their response time, and hopefully it will have a measurable impact over time. They had a number of ideas for other ways to use this data - for example they will enter all the emergency helicopter landing zones (any flat area with at least 100 feet of clearance). The ideal way to use this is to have an app that shows the nearest landing zones, but I don’t know of any such app yet. Of course it would be desirable to minimize the number of different apps they need to learn and to integrate with their current dispatch system.

I recently happened to find another OSM mapper who has mapped road and address details in his rural region and seen a great improvement in average response time using OSMAnd.

And dark and stormy nights aren’t as bad as before!