Announcing MapBox Streets: A Global Map with Street Level Detail
By Dave Cole
We’re excited to release MapBox Streets, our first global block-level map powered by OpenStreetMap. MapBox Streets makes it incredibly easy to get a beautiful, fresh street map on your website or mobile application in place of Google Maps. Get started now using MapBox Streets with a free account from MapBox, or with any of our monthly plans for higher usage and bulk support. For a step-by-step walk-through of how to use MapBox Streets in your web application, see Get Started with MapBox Streets.
Powered by open data
OpenStreetMap is a wiki-style geographic database with 2.7 billion GPS traces from over 545,000 registered users. Building MapBox Streets on OpenStreetMap data gives us a robust foundation and allows us to work with an incredible OpenStreetMap community.
OpenStreetMap is open for anyone to contribute, which has proven critical, even in situations of crisis response. This means we will be able to continually improve MapBox Streets by contributing back to OpenStreetMap any improvements we generate, while also pulling in changes from others. We’re confident this will get us to the most complete and useful maps on the web.
Fresh design
We wanted to design a map that was flexible enough to be the right choice for a variety of use cases. From showing locations of addresses with markers to navigation, MapBox Streets is a clean design with rich detail where you need it, but without additional clutter like business names and point-of-interest icons. You should get to choose what POIs to feature based on your own business needs and data. To make this easy we released Maki, and open source POI icon set.
We designed MapBox Streets from the ground up to maintain this flexibility while providing a fresh alternative to the ubiquitous default Google Maps. We paid particular attention to simplifying the design of streets and focused on clear typography and label placement. The entire map was designed using TileMill, our free map design application, and the stylesheets on which we based this design are also open source.
What’s next
Today’s release of MapBox Streets is the next step on our roadmap for building a comprehensive cloud-based map publishing platform. We will expand MapBox Streets to include additional zoom levels as well as make frequent data updates to improve coverage and quality.
We will also release MapBox Light in the coming weeks — a minimalist grayscale base map, particularly designed for overlaying shaded areas and data visualization. Beyond that we will roll out style controls so people can take charge of the design of these maps and alter colors and features. This will be particularly exciting for folks who want a high quality worldwide street map with a branded, custom look. All of this is possible because we’re building on the incredibly fast, reliable, and scalable map publishing platform we’ve built for sharing custom maps.
If you’re new to MapBox, check out the newly revised MapBox tour and our roadmap for a better sense of what we’re all about. Also the MapBox blog provides a comprehensive look at what we’ve been up to and where we’re going.
Of course you can stay up to date on upcoming releases and developments by following us on Twitter @MapBox or subscribing to our newsletter. If you have specific questions or want to talk about custom plans, please feel free to contact us.
