osmand shoud differenciate between vignette and toll!

[ralph lumen]

I discovered the adac drive app to offer exactly that and it is super useful! toll/maut is for certain roads or bridges or tunnels, while a vignette is valid for a certain country for a certain period of time. osmand only offers to avoid maut/toll!

i.e.: I want to drive from the center of germany to satu mare, the first romanian town coming via hungary. in the mentioned app I can set: use highways, but avoid toll generally plus avoid vignette in poland, czechia, slovakia and hungary, but not in romania and bulgaria (all these plus austria, switzerland and slovenia are selectable). super useful and I wish, osmand would offer that too. the adac drive app can calculate that route of 1200km within 3 seconds ... try that with osmand - more or less impossible.

[Xavier]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2026 at 09:18:17AM -0700, ralph lumen wrote:
>I discovered the adac drive app to offer exactly that and it is super
>useful! toll/maut is for certain roads or bridges or tunnels, while a
>vignette is valid for a certain country for a certain period of time.
>osmand only offers to avoid maut/toll!

Are vignette's [1] recorded in OpenStreetMap on the OSM dataset?

If not, then OSMAnd would have to have some other dataset (which may
not exist except by paying the local governments fees for their data)
that indicated when/where vignettes were charged, and on what roads,
before it could offer an "avoid vignette" option for routing.



[1] I had never heard of these before, I had to look it up to
understand what kind of "toll/tax" it was.

[Greg Troxel]

"'Xavier' via OsmAnd" <osm...@googlegroups.com> writes:

> Are vignette's [1] recorded in OpenStreetMap on the OSM dataset?
>
> If not, then OSMAnd would have to have some other dataset (which may
> not exist except by paying the local governments fees for their data)
> that indicated when/where vignettes were charged, and on what roads,
> before it could offer an "avoid vignette" option for routing.

I would go further and say that for data that can reasonably be in OSM,
then it should be, and osmand should use it. Having a workaround is
just extra work without solving the long-term problem of open data.

>
> [1] I had never heard of these before, I had to look it up to
> understand what kind of "toll/tax" it was.

Me too. In (English-speaking) London, and now New York, there is
"congestion charge" where every day that you operate a vehicle in some
defined area during some hours -- basically center city where it's too
crowded -- you have to pay the congestion charge. But it's meant to
discourage cars in downtown, not be a country-wide road usage toll.

[ralph lumen]

vignettes have to be bought in the countries mentioned, mostly if you want to use highways. in romania and bulgaria for MOST roads, but there vignettes are quite cheap. the best overview I found is here, including pdfs.

[Xavier]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2026 at 12:43:15PM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
>"'Xavier' via OsmAnd" <osm...@googlegroups.com> writes:
>
>> Are vignette's [1] recorded in OpenStreetMap on the OSM dataset?
>>
>> If not, then OSMAnd would have to have some other dataset (which may
>> not exist except by paying the local governments fees for their data)
>> that indicated when/where vignettes were charged, and on what roads,
>> before it could offer an "avoid vignette" option for routing.
>
>I would go further and say that for data that can reasonably be in OSM,
>then it should be,

While I would agree, OSMAnd can only request OpenStreetMap add the data
if it is missing. And a quick search of the OpenStreetMap wiki shows
only sporadic occurrences of the word vignette, none of which appear to
be related to storing "vignette" information in the actual map. So the
OpenStreetMap community would need to add the data before it would be
available from the OSM dataset.

>and osmand should use it.

Once available, yes. But OSMAnd can not make use of data it does not
yet have.

>Having a workaround is just extra work without solving the long-term
>problem of open data.

Yes. Ralph might be best advised to post a question/comment on an OSM
forum local to one of the countries with vignettes asking why such
facts do not seem (to the extent of my very limited search) to be
recorded in the OSM map data. It would seem that such facts would be
just as important to record as speed limits and/or weight/height limits
on the roads in the map.

[Greg Troxel]

"'Xavier' via OsmAnd" <osm...@googlegroups.com> writes:

> While I would agree, OSMAnd can only request OpenStreetMap add the
> data if it is missing. And a quick search of the OpenStreetMap wiki
> shows only sporadic occurrences of the word vignette, none of which
> appear to be related to storing "vignette" information in the actual
> map. So the OpenStreetMap community would need to add the data before
> it would be available from the OSM dataset.

True, but we are really one large community, even though individuals
have stronger focus in various sub-parts.

[Harry van der Wolf]

OpenStreetMap has always been about mapping physical and observable features in the world.

Never about legal rules applying to a country. And even though speed limits to roads are determined by the country, they are specifically bound to "highway", not a general rule for "everything" in that country.

Unless this is added to OSM, like Xavier is already mentioning, Osmand cannot get it out of OSM. OSM would require some extension on admin_level=2 for country borders.

However, it would be extremely simple to make OsmAnd "vignette" aware without even touching OSM or requiring a change in OSM.

OsmAnd does constant GPS requests during use and navigation. Based on the GPS position, OsmAnd gets the info from the underlying map in which country it is.

Osmand could very easily use a json file, a separate one or from its internal assets, to read if it is in a "vignette" country and add the routing restrictions for it.

The json would simply be something like:

{
  "AT": { "vignette_required": true },
  "CH": { "vignette_required": true },

  "CZ": { "vignette_required": true },
  "DE": { "vignette_required": false }

< .... snip .... >

  "NL":  { "vignette_required": false }

< .... snip .... >
}

"Someone" should bring this to the developers, if it is that important to that "someone". ;)

Harry

Op zo 29 mrt 2026 om 21:08 schreef Greg Troxel <g...@lexort.com>:

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[Greg Troxel]

Harry van der Wolf <hvd...@gmail.com> writes:

> OpenStreetMap has always been about mapping physical and observable
> features in the world.
> Never about legal rules applying to a country. And even though speed limits
> to roads are determined by the country, they are specifically bound to
> "highway", not a general rule for "everything" in that country.

Technically true but I'm not sure it's really true.

But what you are saying is basically:

If this kind of geodata is not in OSM, then it could be published by
some other project, and osmand could load it from there instead.

which still leaves us as "someone(tm) should add this data to some
database and publish it".

Were I the osmand maintainer, I'd probably see it as out of scope to
develop databases.

[ralph lumen]

in the imprint of the adac app they mention the use of openstreetmaps.

does no dev read this here? I do not know any.

[Harry van der Wolf]

Op ma 30 mrt 2026 om 16:45 schreef ralph lumen <hinter...@gmail.com>:

in the imprint of the adac app they mention the use of openstreetmaps.

does no dev read this here? I do not know any.

That doesn't mean they use it completely. The ANWB app in the Netherlands uses OSM for maps, but they have their own traffic information, fuel prices , EV loading points and more.

Devs hardly ever read this forum. It needs to be made an issue in their issue tracker.