Rack Finder

Find bike parking near you, and add whatever is missing to the map everyone shares.

There are a lot of “finder” apps: NearToilets, the Little Free Library Map, WeTap for drinking fountains. Most share the same flaw. They keep their records in a proprietary database, so everything a volunteer contributes is locked inside one company’s product and disappears when that company does.

The right database already exists#

OpenStreetMap is a crowdsourced map of the world, built to describe anything you can point at. The data is free to download, free to query, and open to contributions.

That makes it the correct home for this whole genre of app. Every finder app built on it reads the same trusted source, and every contribution improves all of them at once. Nobody competes on who holds the better copy of the data.

Rack Finder#

I commute by bike, so the object I wanted to find was bike parking. Rack Finder reads it from OpenStreetMap and sorts what it finds by distance. Each result carries the details that decide whether you use it: type, capacity, and whether it stands in the open.

Contributing back#

The map is only as good as the last person who added to it, so adding has to be easy. You sign in with your own OpenStreetMap account, and the form asks plain questions: rack type, capacity, covered or exposed, public or private. It writes the answers as proper OpenStreetMap tags, credited to you.

What it became#

The same app shape works for any object OpenStreetMap knows about, and it knows about a great deal. That idea outgrew a single-purpose app and became the starting point for Parchment Maps.