Routing on OpenStreetMap.org
I worked on this problem for a private company. We ended up doing quite a bit to accomplish this: hired a team to edit OSM data, and wrote our own router. What we learned is that OSM data can be quite terrible at times in minute ways that made it look decent but made routing nearly impossible. I believe this effort is still ongoing and in at least the areas where that company has clients the OSM data is now much more pristine.<p>I sort of wish the router got open sourced, but then again it was not great for long distance routing since we were doing mostly local stuff. For example, routing across the US would have taken pretty close to exponential time.<p>Interestingly, we could not make Google Maps, or any other maps work for this besides OSM for two reasons: the data wasn't good enough and the roads were not uniquely and stably identified in the routes these API's produced.<p>Lastly, I will say that the biggest challenge to using OSM at scale, aside from varying quality of data was lack of good servers and documentation. Some of their secondary services run on one-off slowish hardware with pretty strict rate limits. We would run our own, except the documentation (and the packaging) for OSM software was leaving something to be desired. That is to say if you want to help OSM, there are plenty of ways to do so.