maps.earth

The Headway Project was born out of a frustration with the need to send current and future location data to a corporation in order to figure out how we’re getting from A to B. Offline-only maps apps can be frustrating to use, and sometimes suffer from performance problems, poor data coverage, or other technical limitations.

Headway aims to remedy these issues by bundling industry-standard software into a web app that’s easy to set up for yourself or your friends. No need to send your location data to anyone you don’t trust, not even maps.earth.

Run it yourself

maps.earth is a planet-scale installation of Headway, but you can easily set up your own server on a smaller scale for your own personal use by running just a few commands.

$ earthly -P +build --area=Amsterdam $ cp .env-example .env $ docker-compose up -d

That’s all it takes to bring up a fully functional maps server for the Amsterdam metro area, including place and address search, and routing via car, bicycle and on foot. Other areas require small tweaks to the .env file. More details are available in the project’s BUILD.md file.

This project would be impossible without the tireless work of the OpenStreetMap community. If you’ve spent time and effort contributing the larger OpenStreetMap ecosystem, thank you. In particular, Headway relies on the following projects in no particular order:

OpenStreetMap Planetiler MapLibre Pelias OpenTripPlanner Valhalla Who’s On First MobilityData database And many others

Additionally, Headway is able to automate much of the build process thanks to the BBBike extract service.