Charging Stations 2025 Plan
Introduction
The EV charging landscape has changed a lot of in that last few years. Tagging these is difficult because often key information isn't easily viewable from a casual mapper on the ground. Even for an experience EV charging mapper you can be unlikely to know some core information just If you don't use an EV you are unlikely to know the importance of power or different sockets.
Just having a charging station mapped with no other information might seem very useful for a non EV educated mapper but the amount of chargers, sockets (to use the OSM terms), speed of charger is very important. It could be a single 3kW charger to a 50 x 350kW 800V charger station without a 50kW CHAdeMO socket in sight.
Just knowing a charging station exists isn't much help to users. There is a lot of poor information already in tags and editor support isn't great at the moment.
This page is framework of some of the issues need to overcome to make charging stations and their charging points a more useful and vibrant part of OSM.
Current Issues
Editor Support
It is difficult to map effectively in many editors. A plan to improve these. Make it easy for users to enter some of the core basics needed like capacity, sockets and power. Some of these might be more difficult to achieve than others. They should be as easy as possible someone with no knowledge to try add something and a advanced enough that core.
Review the editor and areas for improvement, Focusing the core values (capacity, sockets, power)
| Editor | Capacity | Sockets | Power | Proposals |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ID | Yes | No | No | https://github.com/openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema/issues/1605
https://github.com/openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema/pull/1577 |
| Organic Maps | No | No | No | |
| JOSM |
NSI (Name Suggestion Index) linking many editor for standard. Work to improve this.
Improvement links:
https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index/pull/11036 Completed about 50 Station improvements. (more to come)
Cover more comprehensively the popular suggestions for the operators and brands for the charging stations. Currently in a bit of a confusing mess.
Documentation & Guidelines (wiki, etc)
A review again of the charging stations wiki and look at associated wiki tesla superchargers for example. Definitions for what is an operator, brand and network. These can mean different things to different people.
Have more detailed explainations for each tag
Some pages for each countries for more common examples and unique nuanced situations there for better guidelines can be linked here too.
Better map visibility
Getting maps to display better information about the charge stations.
OSMCarto (the main map)
Improve how it displays charging stations link
The openstreetmap website does not currently show charge stations icons changeset display.
Import projects
With most (western) CPO now adding OCPI data the amount of open datasets that are produced for their sites there likely imports will be part of this and highlight some of the import type projects that are due to start or starting this year.
United States AFDC Manual Sync Project
EV charge points in the United Kingdom
Current Proposals
Proposal:Deprecate socket:tesla supercharger and socket:tesla destination Voting now