Staying cool with OpenStreetMap

Jun 26, 2024
openstreetmap osm maps
2 min read

London is unpleasantly warm right now. And will be so for a while.

If you want to find somewhere where the heat won’t cause your brain to shut down, OpenStreetMap can help.

OpenStreetMap has a tag called air_conditioning. According to taginfo, 71,239 places have been tagged with the value yes.

You can find these places using Overpass, an API that lets you search the map using tags, and Overpass Turbo, a web-based tool for testing Overpass queries.

Go to Overpass Turbo, copy the following code in, move the map to your location and hit run.

[out:json][timeout:25];
nwr["air_conditioning"="yes"]["amenity"="pub"]({{bbox}});
out geom;

The second tag I included in the query above is for the tag amenity=pub. You can remove the entire second tag filter and just show all the places tagged as having air conditioning.

Alternatively, you can use the pre-prepared queries below.

If the data is incomplete in your area, you can fix it!

LearnOSM is an introductory guide on how to edit OpenStreetMap. iD, the browser-based editor on the OpenStreetMap website includes a simple toggle for the air conditioning tag.

If you use Android, StreetComplete is designed for quickly editing the map, and Vespucci allows you to do much more complex edits.

For iOS, Every Door is for on-the-go edits, while Go Map!! is a more advanced editor.

For both platforms, you should grab Organic Maps, a free offline map viewer that lets you download entire regions or countries for use offline - you can use it for navigation (by car, on foot, bike etc.) without an unpleasantly large technology company like Google getting any of your data.