November 2020 update: Curvature has recently been featured in Car and Driver and other press, and traffic to the site has increased significantly! As a data-intensive solo project, the influx of people using the map is driving operational costs beyond what I can sustain by myself. Can you chip in to help keep Curvature free to the world?
Curvature has been a passion project for me since I started building it in 2012. I use it to plan motorcycle trips so that I can skip the long straightaways and have more fun while exploring the world. I also use it as an entry into exploring and improving the fascinating virtual model of the world that is OpenStreetMap. Designing and building this system has been a wonderful journey and it couldn’t be done without the community of editors that contribute open data to OpenStreetMap, and others who have joined me in developing Curvature. As an open source software and open data advocate, I’m happy to be able to share this work freely with the world. This biggest way to improve the project is to improve roadways in OpenStreetMap (as described here).
At the same time, processing, storing, and serving this worldwide data requires significant computational resources. For the past few years I’ve been self funding the servers that host Curvature to the tune of about $700 per year. While I’ll keep running the service at a basic level, I want to give others who find Curvature useful a way to contribute to the project, so I will gladly accept donations of any amount to help cover the hosting costs and make the service more robust.
I’m in the process of setting up a recurring support/patron system, but in the meantime you can send one-time contributions of any amount via PayPal or Venmo:
With gratitude,
Adam