Cartes, a free European alternative to Google Maps

https://cartes.app/blog/a-free-european-alternative-to-google-maps

We're building a free alternative to Google Maps, based on OpenStreetMap. It's a French project, aiming at a wide usage in France before going international.

Despite its very detailed map database covering Europe and France, OpenStreetMap is largely missing from the French citizens' daily map usage, mostly because OSM's interfaces are missing lots of features compared to the commercial solutions.

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In parallel, and that is the second motivation to build Cartes, most maps incite one to use cars : Google, Apple Maps (default view) but also the french leaders Mappy and Viamichelin. The only transportation infrastructure visible at high zoom is the network of car roads, while rails aren't even visible at high zoom. Google Maps was built and is still developped in the USA, a country abysmally behind Europe in terms of railway coverage.

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Cartes is actively developed by Mael Thomas-Quillévéré since january 2024 as a very serious benevolent side project, and helped by a community of dozens of people on github and OSM France's dedicated forum category. It is fully AGPL open source, both the Typescript Web app and the two servers serving tiles, transit data, the search engine, and transit calculation.

Its scope is limited to France, on purpose : we don't want to build a mediocre application (on Apple Maps's standards) for the world, nor an average application for Europe. Even in France, we're starting from the western regions, eating our own dog food, using it daily. Transit data, localisation, and tile generation are the main hurdles.

We're aiming at a 1.0 version in the beginning of 2025, when we'll then be able to talk about internationalisation.

Very interesting project!