JUjuliansimioni·Jan 2, 2021
(Former Mapzen employee here).
I _think_ you're talking about Eraser Map(https://github.com/mapzen/eraser-map) right?
It was awesome! It's the closest I know of to "Google Maps, but open source and based on open data". It was an app built for _end users_, not OSM editors. And it worked pretty darn well. When it didn't, any problems could (at least theoretically) be addressed with improvements to OSM data or the Mapzen open-source projects.
There was a team of at least two people working on it full time, plus lots of work on the design, product, and integration with geocoding, routing, transit etc. The multi-modal (switching from walking to transit to car, etc) transit directions were particularly awesome.
I used it as my daily driver for much of my navigation around NYC, and as time went on only had to fall back to Google Maps maybe 25% o
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f the time, usually for missing POI data.
Unfortunately I think it's one of the few Mapzen projects that hasn't seen new life after the company shut down, and like you said it would take quite a bit of work (read: money) to keep it going. It might be possible with some work to find grant money through a couple organizations. The OSMF has done some awesome work lately with the micro-grants, but this would definitely be a level we haven't seen (yet).