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Hivemapper Is 2M Kilometers Closer to Beating Google Maps

It’s a buzzworthy day for the Hivemapper community. Today, April 28, 2023, Hivemapper contributors have collected 2 million km of unique street-level imagery worldwide, up from 1 million km a month ago.
The pace of growth continues to accelerate. Thanks to our decentralized approach, Hivemapper’s current run rate of growth is roughly 8x faster than the 133,000 kilometers per month that Google Street View averaged in the first five years after the launch of Google Street View in May 2007. (source)
With approximately 60 million unique km of road in the world, today’s milestone underscores the rapid progress the Hivemapper community is making in building the world's freshest decentralized map. We're providing the groundwork for high-quality map data that helps people and businesses make better decisions as they move through the world, even in regions historically underserved by centralized mapping organizations.

Growing Exponentially: More places and people

The permissionless, global nature of the Hivemapper project can be seen in the areas lighting up the map this month, including Armenia, Spain, Australia, Brunei, India, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Nigeria, Venezuela, Ecuador, Japan, Taiwan, Cyprus, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania, Ireland, and Taiwan. For a real-time look at ongoing map coverage in different places, visit the Hivemapper Explorer.
As we celebrate our 2 million km milestone, our focus remains on our next milestone: mapping 10 million unique road km. 
One of the keys to quickly reaching 10 million unique km is fleet drivers, including truck drivers. We recently launched Hivemapper Fleets, enabling you to add fleet managers and drivers while determining how you’d like to split HONEY tokens. We’re excited to reach more truck drivers. We’ve seen that when the Hivemapper Dashcam is attached to big rig trucks, it produces fantastic map coverage. 
"Semi-trucks visit places that cars normally never frequent,” says Hivemapper CEO & Co-Founder Ariel Seidman, “Hivemapper is excited to see more trucks join the mapping network."
If you’re a truck driver or know any truck drivers interested in mapping with Hivemapper, fill out this form
There's still time to get in early and earn crypto passively just for driving as you normally would. As we activate new regions –– we constantly need more map contributors. 
Phoenix, Arizona, is the latest region in a high-priority area where we incentivize map coverage. To that extent, we're opening up Hivemapper Dashcam testing to anyone who wants to map in Phoenix, Arizona –– so if you drive a car and want to test the Hivemapper Dashcam for free, fill out this form.

Beyond coverage: real data that you can make decisions from

More than just coverage, a map provides data that helps you make decisions as you move through the world. Hivemapper's Map AI trainers bring us closer to developing an intuitive map.
Hivemapper's Map AI Trainers are small games that teach Hivemapper’s AI about the physical world. For example, here is what a "No U-Turn" sign looks like in the US, this is a speed limit sign and a traffic light. "Without a Map AI to produce the data, you just have a bunch of imagery," said Seidman. So, last week we released a speed-limit AI trainer game. Anyone can help train our AI by contributing here. We’ll share more on Map AI trainers later this week.

An ever-updating map: fresh and detailed

Imagine combining the growth and freshness the Hivemapper Network is producing with games to train our Map AI, real-time incident reports, and other capabilities we're building into the system. People and businesses would have access to fresh and accurate map data representative of the evolving road conditions we experience in cities, towns, neighborhoods, and countries. 
We're now at 2M unique km, but we have quite the journey ahead. We're more up-to-date than Google but streets, cities, and borders are ever changing –– so we must continually hit refresh. The Hivemapper Map is scaling to provide an ever-updating and detailed mapping network that we can all contribute to and benefit from. Reaching the 2 million unique km milestone in map coverage is just the beginning of our journey.

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